Understanding Of Prosody Research Articles

Characteristics of the Understanding and Expression of Emotional Prosody among Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

In verbal communication with others, children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) experience difficulties with understanding jokes, irony, and other pragmatic aspects of communication. Difficulties with the understanding and expression of prosody may be one reason. In this study an understanding of prosody test and an expression of prosody test were constructed and applied to a group of children with ASD (average 9.7 years of age) and three control groups of typical children (3, 4 and 5 years of age, respectively). Overall results showed that the ASD group had lower scores in both prosody tests compared to 5 year old controls but higher scores than the 3 year old controls.

Prosody Learning Strategies and What English Philology Students Know about Them

Although learning strategies are in the focus of attention of both theorists and foreign language teachers, only few scientific descriptions highlight the significance of the prosodic skills and strategies to practice them. This paper discusses the results of the questionnaire the aim of which was to determine English philology students’ understanding of prosody and prosodic skills as well as to identify prosodic strategies they use to improve their pronunciation in English. We can conclude that students understand prosodic phenomenon of language but they cannot define it, and they apply a variety of activities that develop prosodic skills.

From acoustics to grammar: Perceiving and interpreting grammatical prosody in adolescents with Asperger Syndrome

We report findings concerning the understanding of prosody in Asperger Syndrome (AS), a topic which has attracted little attention and led to contradictory results. Ability to understand grammatical prosody was tested in three novel experiments. Experiment 1 assessed the interpretation of word stress, Experiment 2 focused on grammatical pauses, and Experiment 3 tested the discrimination of the question contour. Acoustic tasks were also used to assess the perception of pitch, duration, intensity and prosodic contours. AS participants performed as well as typically developing controls in all our tasks. This provides support in favour of the view that grammatical prosody is spared in Asperger Syndrome.

Lexical and prosodic eues in the comprehension of relative certainty

This study examined the development of children's comprehension of the use of intonation and belief verbs to mark the relative certainty with which a speaker makes a statement. Subjects were presented with a task in which they had to guess the location of an object hidden in one of two boxes over a series of trials. As clues to location, the children were presented with contrasting pairs of statements by two puppets. In the first experiment with 30 children at each of three, four, five and six years of age, statements in each pair differed either with respect to the belief term included - know, think or guess - or with respect to terminal pitch contour - rising or falling. Results showed that three-year-olds did not use any information reliably to determine the location of the object, four-year-olds treated falling pitch as a more reliable indicator of location than rising pitch, and older children responded on the basis of the belief terms but not on the basis of prosody. In Experiment 2, 40 children at each of three, four and five years heard statements which differed with respect to both belief verbs and prosody. In one condition falling intonation was paired with the more certain belief term in each pair, and rising intonation with the less certain pair. In a second condition, the pairings were reversed. Results showed that, while four-year-olds could tell the difference between know and think, they could not use intonation information to determine the location. Five-year-olds used both lexical and prosodic information, with prosodic cues modulating the effects of lexical. Taken together, these experiments show that prosodic and lexical cues start to be used by children to interpret relative speaker certainty at about the same time developmentally, but that lexical cues initially appear to dominate while prosodic ones modulate their effects. Finally, it is argued that children's understanding of prosody will be best revealed in contexts in which they are required to respond to the pragmatic function of verbal stimuli rather than to the lexical content.

Intonation und Prosodie (Intonation and Prosody)

Abstract The modern understanding of prosody and its correlation to intonation on the basis of the author’s Moscow Laboratory experimental data is given in this article. Intonation is not subjected to prosody; the latter is also regarded as the lingual phenomenon sui generis. The hypothesis on communicative, lingual and psychological substance of prosody is proposed.