Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder characterized by atypical development in the domains of social, emotional, language and cognitive functioning in the first few years of life. Research indicates an associated phenomenon of sensory processing abnormalities in the ASD population (Baker, Lane, Angley, & Young, 2008), and specifically auditory domain (Tecchio et al., 2003) which may relate to language deficits (Baranek, David, Poe, Stone & Watson, 2006). This study researched the effect of auditory sensory abnormalities on language in young children with ASD (n = 118), specifically receptive and expressive language and prosody. A specific subdomain of auditory abnormalities, sensory seeking, was found to be predictive of expressive language (β = .30, p=.009), perhaps due to a focus on auditory stimuli to the exclusion of expressive language interaction. There was no significant effect for receptive language (β = .16, p=.16) and prosody (β = -.09, p=.493).

This thesis is a detailed investigation of the phonology and phonetics of the intonation of Persian carried out in the framework of the AM theory of intonational phonology. Based on 2112 utterances read by a total of 8 native speakers, the work, on the one hand, presents a phonological account of the prosodic structure of this language, a structure that consists of the level Accentual Phrase with the pitch accent (L+)H* immediately dominated by the level Intonational Phrase, each level being marked by a low or high boundary tone. On the other hand, it scrutinizes the phonetic implementation of tones with regard to segments and shows how the phonology of Persian intonation is phonetically realized in the speech string. This research also studies the intonational patterns of simplex sentences, compound sentences coordinated with different types of conjunctions, subordinate structures, and vocative constructions. The sentence types include copular verb declaratives, sentences with unaccusative and unergative verbs, (S)(O)V sentences with and without adjuncts, null subject sentences, scrambled sentences, yes/no questions, leading yes/no questions, alternative questions, tag questions, single and multiple WH-questions, echo questions, imperatives, and single, double, and phrase focus constructions. / February 2008

Real-world perception of emotion results from the integration of multiple cues, most notably facial expression and affective prosody. The use of incongruent emotional stimuli presents an opportunity to study the interaction between sensory modalities. Thirty-seven participants were exposed to audio-visual stimuli (Robins & Schultz, 2004) including angry, fearful, happy, and neutral presentations. Eighty stimuli contain matching emotions and 240 contain incongruent emotional cues. Matching emotions elicited a significant number of correct responses for all four emotions. Sign tests indicated that for most incongruent conditions, participants demonstrated a bias towards the visual modality. Despite these findings, specific incongruent conditions did show evidence of blending. Future research should explore an evolutionary model of facial expression as a means for behavioral adaptation and the possibility of an “emotional McGurk effect” in particular combinations of emotions.

Facial animations capable of articulating accurate movements in synchrony with a speech track have become a subject of much research during the past decade. Most of these efforts have focused on articulation of lip and tongue movements, since these are the primary sources of information in speech reading. However, a wealth of paralinguistic information is implicitly conveyed through visual prosody (e.g., head and eyebrow movements). In contrast with lip/tongue movements, however, for which the articulation rules are fairly well known (i.e., viseme-phoneme mappings, coarticulation), little is known about the generation of visual prosody. The objective of this thesis is to explore the perceptual contributions of visual prosody in speech-driven facial avatars. Our main hypothesis is that visual prosody driven by acoustics of the speech signal, as opposed to random or no visual prosody, results in more realistic, coherent and convincing facial animations. To test this hypothesis, we have developed an audio-visual system capable of capturing synchronized speech and facial motion from a speaker using infrared illumination and retro-reflective markers. In order to elicit natural visual prosody, a story-telling experiment was designed in which the actors were shown a short cartoon video, and subsequently asked to narrate the episode. From this audio-visual data, four different facial animations were generated, articulating no visual prosody, Perlin-noise, speech-driven movements, and ground truth movements. Speech-driven movements were driven by acoustic features of the speech signal (e.g., fundamental frequency and energy) using rule-based heuristics and autoregressive models. A pair-wise perceptual evaluation shows that subjects can clearly discriminate among the four visual prosody animations. It also shows that speech-driven movements and Perlin-noise, in that order, approach the performance of veridical motion. The results are quite promising and suggest that speech-driven motion could outperform Perlin-noise if more powerful motion prediction models are used. In addition, our results also show that exaggeration can bias the viewer to perceive a computer generated character to be more realistic motion-wise.

Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 174 pages. / Thesis (M.S.)--University of South Florida, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: This study investigated the affiliation of prosody with childhood articulation disorders. The Tennessee Test of Rhythm and Intonation Patterns, T-TRIP (Koike & Asp, 1981), was used to determine if kindergartners with linguistic (i.e. phonological) speech disorders, oral-motor speech disorders, or normal speech performed differently on imitative prosody tasks. Performance was assessed perceptually with T-TRIP overall and subtest scores, and acoustically with measurements of individual prosodic variables (amplitude, duration, and fundamental frequency) on selected items from the rhythm and intonation subtests. Perceptual and acoustic data were examined for characteristic patterns of performance by individual subjects and by groups. A Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA of the perceptual scores revealed that the three groups performed differently on the T-TRIP rhythm, and intonation subtests, and on the total score. / ABSTRACT: Specifically, the oral-motor group had the lowest range of scores and was clearly separated from the other two groups. No group cut-off scores were established since the linguistic group's scores slightly overlapped the control groups' range of scores. Acoustic results generally supported the findings of earlier studies of stress and intonation. Correct responses contained a wide selection of acoustic patterns, while incorrect responses consisted of error patterns resembling those of younger children. Subjects with speech disorders demonstrated several characteristic error patterns: linguistic subjects tended to add syllables and to lexicalize items, while oral-motor subjects tended to delete syllables and to convert iambic stress into trochaic. Overall, whether T-TRIP responses were examined by perceptual or acoustic methods, the oral-motor group's imitative prosody ability was significantly different than the other groups' performance. / ABSTRACT: The clinical implications of this finding are that the T-TRIP has the potential to be used as a screening tool to identify subjects whose difficulties with imitative prosody are consistent with oral-motor speech disorders, specifically DVD. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

To date, no real consensus has emerged among syntacticians about how to derive verb-initial order (V1); but the two main approaches, \(V^0\)-raising and VP-raising, receive particularly widespread support in the literature. The syntax of Niuean pseudo noun incorporation (PNI) has played an important role in the propagation of the VP-raising analysis (Massam 2001), especially for VSO languages and languages with a VSO option. In this thesis, I present an analysis of the prosody of Niuean PNI and show that the PNI verb and incorporated argument form a prosodic constituent. While this result is consistent with the syntactic analysis of Massam (2001), it is also consistent with a prosodic restructuring analysis that explains the VOS order of PNI by appealing to prosodic well-formedness. I take the second approach. Specifically, the principle behind Selkirk's (1984) Sense Unit Condition requires that the verb and its internal argument(s) form a unique phonological phrase. In order to satisfy this requirement, the incorporated argument moves into a position adjacent to the verb at PF. Positionally motivated categorical feature sharing (Adger and Svenonius 2011; Pesetsky and Torrego 2007) allows PF to reference the head-argument relationship between the verb and its internal argument, even though they are not sent to PF in structurally adjacent positions. The main result for the syntactic analysis of Niuean is that \(V^0\)-raising replaces VP-raising. The benefits of the \(V^0\)-raising approach include i) less phonologically vacuous structure in places where Niuean has overt morphology, e.g., a perpetually null \(T^0\) in the face of overt tense markers; and ii) observance of the idea that thematic roles are correlated to structural positions. Thus, the prosodic analysis of Niuean PNI has a number of positive outcomes for Niuean syntax, as well as the potential to simplify the derivation of VSO cross-linguistically. / Linguistics

It has long been argued that prosodic cues may facilitate syntax acquisition (e.g., Morgan, 1986). Previous studies have shown that infants are sensitive to violations of typical correlations between clause-final prosodic cues (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987) and that prosody facilitates memory for strings of words (Soderstrom et al., 2005). This dissertation broaches the question of whether children can use this information in syntax acquisition by asking if learners can use the prosodic correlates of clauses to locate syntactic constituents. One property of certain syntactic constituents in natural languages is that they can move, so learning of constituency was inferred if participants treated prosodically-grouped words as cohesive, moveable chunks. In Experiment 1, 19-month-olds were familiarized with sentences from an artificial grammar with either 1-clause or 2-clause prosody. The infants from the 2-clause group later recognized the prosodically-marked clauses when they had moved to a new position in the sentence and had a new acoustic contour. Adults in Experiment 2 showed similar learning, although their judgments also rely on recognition of perceptually-salient words at prosodic boundaries. Subsequent experiments explored the mechanisms underlying this prosodic bootstrapping by testing Japanese-acquiring infants on English-based stimuli (Experiment 3) and English-acquiring infants on Japanese-based stimuli (Experiment 4). Infants were able to locate constituent-like groups of words with both native and non-native prosody, suggesting that the acoustic correlates of prosody are sufficiently robust across languages that they can be used in early syntax acquisition without extensive exposure to language-specific prosodic features. On the other hand, adults (Experiment 5) are less flexible, and are only able to use prosody consistent with their native language, suggesting an age- or experience-related tuning of the prosodic perceptual mechanism. This dissertation supports prosody as an important cue that allows infants and young children to break into syntax even before they understand many words, and helps explain the rapid rate of syntax acquisition.

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Until recently, the majority of research in the area of English phonological awareness has centered on segmental phonology as predictors of reading. Current research, however, has expanded the concept of phonological awareness to include prosodic sensitivity⎯the awareness of suprasegmental information. The present study explores the role of five segmental and suprasegmental levels of English phonological awareness as predictors of individual differences in word reading in Korean children learning English. 104 native Hangul speaking children in Grade 3 were assessed on English levels of stress, syllable, rime, simple phoneme, and consonant cluster awareness, as well as, English and Hangul word reading. Hierarchical regression models indicated that awareness of syllables, onset/rime units, and phonemes within consonant clusters were uniquely predictive of individual differences in L2 English word reading after accounting for cognitive ability, English background variables, and L1 word reading. Awareness of stress-timed patterns contributed to common variance in English and Hangul word reading, but was not uniquely predictive in final regression models. No level of phonological awareness was predictive of Hangul word reading. Results support the notion that segmental phonological elements not present in L1 may be predictive of individual differences in L2 word reading. Furthermore, cross-language transfer of PA may be weak in the direction of English (L2) to Hangul (L1). / Thesis (Master, Education) -- Queen's University, 2010-06-30 18:10:10.564

This thesis is a detailed investigation of the phonology and phonetics of the intonation of Persian carried out in the framework of the AM theory of intonational phonology. Based on 2112 utterances read by a total of 8 native speakers, the work, on the one hand, presents a phonological account of the prosodic structure of this language, a structure that consists of the level Accentual Phrase with the pitch accent (L+)H* immediately dominated by the level Intonational Phrase, each level being marked by a low or high boundary tone. On the other hand, it scrutinizes the phonetic implementation of tones with regard to segments and shows how the phonology of Persian intonation is phonetically realized in the speech string. This research also studies the intonational patterns of simplex sentences, compound sentences coordinated with different types of conjunctions, subordinate structures, and vocative constructions. The sentence types include copular verb declaratives, sentences with unaccusative and unergative verbs, (S)(O)V sentences with and without adjuncts, null subject sentences, scrambled sentences, yes/no questions, leading yes/no questions, alternative questions, tag questions, single and multiple WH-questions, echo questions, imperatives, and single, double, and phrase focus constructions.