Language and Speech

In this study, some prosodic aspects of the disyllabic vocalizations (both babbling and words) produced by four French and four Japanese children of about 18 months of age, are examined. F₀ contour and vowel durations in disyllables are found to be clearly language-specific. For French infants, rising F₀ contours and final syllable lengthening are the rule, whereas falling F₀ contours and absence of final lengthening are the rule for Japanese children. These results are congruent with adult prosody in the two languages. They hold for both babbling and utterances identified as words. The disyllables produced by the Japanese infants reflect adult forms not only in terms of global intonation patterns, but also in terms of tone and duration characteristics at the lexical level.

Two experiments investigated how people assign an interpretation to question phrases. In order to determine the meaning of the WH-phrase (e.g., who, what), a “gap” must be located and the role associated with the gap assigned to the WH-phrase. Two experiments tested the Lexical Expectation model of Fodor (1978), according to which lexical properties of the verb determine when a gap is posited, and the All Resorts model of Stowe (1984), according to which all possibilities are considered and evaluated on their pragmatic appropriateness. In Experiment 1, subjects judged the meaningfulness of full sentences. The frequency with which verbs are used transitively determined whether there was an effect of the plausibility of the WH-phrase to act as an object of the verb. Effects of plausibility of the WH-phrase as an object showed up in just those cases where the object role should be assigned to the WH-phrase according to the Lexical Expectation model, rather than as predicted by the All Resorts model. In Experiment 2, these results were replicated using the word-by-word self-paced reading paradigm. The plausibility effect showed up at the verb itself when it is normally used transitively. This evidence suggests that a gap is preferred even over a lexically filled object for transitive expectation verbs.

This study investigated the speech and writing of 18 normal and 11 poor readers in second grade in order to determine whether children make morphological errors in writing that they do not make in speech. Ten sentences with complex syntactic structures were elicited, both orally and in writing (e.g., “Who do you think eats fries?” “Point to the dog that licks babies”). Each sentence provided opportunities for the children to erroneously omit, add, or substitute an inflection. In the spoken task, virtually no inflectional errors were observed in either group. In contrast, in the written task, good readers omitted an average of 0.4 inflections out of a possible 20 whereas the poor readers omitted an average of 7.6 inflections each, a highly significant difference. This suggests that poor readers have adequate grammatical knowledge, but poor explicit awareness of morphological structure.

This paper describes a corpus of unscripted, task-oriented dialogues which has been designed, digitally recorded, and transcribed to support the study of spontaneous speech on many levels. The corpus uses the Map Task (Brown, Anderson, Yule, and Shillcock, 1983) in which speakers must collaborate verbally to reproduce on one participant's map a route printed on the other's. In all, the corpus includes four conversations from each of 64 young adults and manipulates the following variables: familiarity of speakers, eye contact between speakers, matching between landmarks on the participants' maps, opportunities for contrastive stress, and phonological characteristics of landmark names. The motivations for the design are set out and basic corpus statistics are presented.