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While both segmental and suprasegmental aspects of words have been recognised as potential factors influencing their iconic interpretations, how these components collectively drive the associations of form and affective meaning remains elusive. The current study addressed this issue in a lexical tonal language, Standard Chinese, where suprasegmental pitch information distinguishes word meanings. Specifically, we investigated how phonemic information at both the segmental level (i.e., vowels and consonants) and suprasegmental level (i.e., lexical tones) may influence native Standard Chinese listeners’ rating of auditory stimuli’s emotional arousal and valence in two-alternative forced-choice tasks. The results indicated a consistent correlation between tones and the perceived arousal and valence ratings of the tone-carrying nonce words. At the segmental level, consonants were more consistently associated with arousal, while vowels correlated with valence. Furthermore, lexical tones were more influential than segmental phonemes in biasing listeners’ rating of affective meanings. Regarding arousal ratings, nonce words with falling and rising tones tended to be rated with higher arousal than those with high- and low-dipping tones. Additionally, those with an onset /t/ were rated higher in arousal than those with /n/. Regarding valence ratings, nonce words with falling and low-dipping tones were more likely to receive negative ratings than those with high and rising tones. Moreover, stimuli with /u/ were more inclined to be perceived negatively than those with /i/. Though subtle and sporadic, these findings support the universal tendency of affective iconicity across segments and suprasegmental tones.

This paper investigates the acoustic correlates of stress in European Portuguese. Using a nonce word experiment, this study controls the phonological environment of the stimuli so stressed and unstressed vowels with the same quality can be directly compared. Of the five acoustic measures examined, duration is the most robust correlate of stress, but the effect is limited to certain vowels and speakers. Care is taken to separate the effects of independent phonological processes on acoustic properties that are also influenced by stress.

For decades, developmental research has involved the study of sex differences in language acquisition. Many studies of these differences have found a slight advantage in competence for females early in life that seems to wane with age. However, because most of these studies have focused on sex differences in mean values, they have mostly neglected sex differences in variance with males being more variable. In the current study, we examined sex differences in language competence in terms of mean values and variance in large samples (N > 10,000) of German children aged 3–6 years. We administered several tests to assess the children's vocabulary, grammar, speech comprehension, pronunciation, and the processing of sentences and nonce words. Girls performed better than boys in all domains, most often to a statistically significant degree, although the effect sizes were small. Differences decreased with age. Boys varied significantly more than girls in their language competence. In response, we discuss explanations for these findings, as well as recommend directions for future research.

Previous research on the acquisition of grammatical gender has shown that this property is acquired early in transparent gender systems such as Russian. However, it is not clear to what extent children are sensitive to the assignment cues and to what extent they simply memorize correspondences between frequent lexical items. Furthermore, we do not know if bilingual children are different from monolingual children in this respect. This article reports on a study investigating bilingual children’s sensitivity to gender assignment cues in Russian. A group of 64 bilingual German–Russian children living in Germany participated in the study, as well as 107 monolingual controls in Russia. The elicitation experiments used both real and nonce words, as well as noun phrases with mismatched cues (where the morphophonological shape of the noun cued one gender and the agreement on the modifying adjective another). The results show that both bilinguals and monolinguals are highly sensitive to cues, both to the frequent transparent cues and to more fine-grained gender regularities in situations where there is ambiguity. There is also an age effect, showing that younger children pay more attention to the cue on the noun itself, thus displaying a preference for regular patterns, while older children are more sensitive to gender agreement on other targets.

This study examined the acquisition of numeral classifiers in 120 monolingual Japanese children. Previous research has argued that the complex semantic system underlying classifiers is late acquired. Thus, we set out to determine the age at which Japanese children are able to extend the semantic properties of classifiers to novel items/situations. Participants completed a comprehension task with a mouse-tracking extension and a production task with nonce and familiar items. While the comprehension results showed ceiling effects on familiar and nonce items, age significantly modulated a difference in accuracy between familiar and nonce items in the production task. The findings suggest that the acquisition of the underlying semantic system is acquired much earlier than previously argued. Previously attested issues with Japanese classifier production in young(er) children are more likely to reflect accessing difficulties than indexing the underlying grammatical competence of the classifier system.

Speakers learn detailed generalizations about the morphophonology of their language and extend them to nonce words. We propose a theory of this morphophonological knowledge that partitions the lexicon into uniform and productive sublexicons. Each sublexicon has its own phonotactic grammar, which the speaker uses as an inference mechanism to determine the relative productivity of each sublexicon. We report the results of an experiment on the generalization of mid vowel deletion (\"yer\" deletion) in Russian, showing that speakers encode source-oriented generalizations about the shapes of words that can undergo vowel deletion, as well as product-oriented generalizations about words that result from vowel deletion. An implementation of our model learns the patterns of deletion and captures both source-oriented and product-oriented generalizations.

We investigate German–Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system, where both formal and semantic cues are psycho linguistically relevant, German has weak phonological cues compared to other languages, and children have been argued to acquire semantic and phonological rules in tandem. German–Russian bilingual children face the challenge of acquiring two different gender assignment systems simultaneously. We tested 45 bilingual children (ages 4–10 years) and monolingual controls. Results show that the children are clearly sensitive to phonological cues, while semantic cues play a minor role. However, monolingual and bilingual children have different defaulting strategies, with monolinguals defaulting to neuter and bilinguals to feminine gender.

Forty-eight toddlers participated in a word-learning task to assess gesture input on mapping nonce words to unfamiliar objects. Receptive fast mapping and expressive naming for target object-word pairs were tested in three conditions – with a point, with a shape gesture, and in a no-gesture, word-only condition. No statistically significant effect of gesture for receptive fast-mapping was found but age was a factor. Two year olds outperformed one year olds for both measures. Only one girl in the one-year-old group correctly named any items. There was a significant interaction between gesture and gender for expressive naming. Two-year-old girls were six times more likely than two-year-old boys to correctly name items given point and shape gestures; whereas, boys named more items taught with the word only than with a point or shape gesture. The role of gesture input remains unclear, particularly for children under two years and for toddler boys.

This article presents articulatory–kinematic data on preboundary lengthening (Intonational Phrase-final lengthening) from the productions of ten native speakers of American English—a relatively rare class of phonetic data compared with the more widely available acoustic data. The dataset includes three trisyllabic nonce words (bábaba, babába, bababá), each designed to manipulate the location of lexical stress. These were produced under prosodic conditions that varied in boundary position and focus-induced phrasal prominence, enabling analysis of how preboundary lengthening is distributed across words with different lexical stress locations and how it interacts with prosodic prominence. Articulatory data were collected using electromagnetic articulography (EMA, Carstens AG200), providing kinematic measurements such as movement duration, peak velocity, and displacement of articulatory gestures. The accompanying files allow examination of individual speaker variation in these measures as modulated by prosodic structure, including boundary and prominence effects. While theoretical findings have been reported in a previous study, the full dataset, including detailed descriptions of individual speaker patterns, is made available here. By making these less commonly available articulatory data publicly available, we aim to promote broad reuse and support further research in prosody, articulatory phonetics, and speech production. Dataset: Dataset License: CC BY 4.0

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is characterized by atypical timing between segments, leading to prosodic disruption at the lexical level. This study tested whether prosodic impairment in CAS extends to the intonational level by examining declination of fundamental frequency (f0). Eleven children with CAS and ten typically developing (TD) peers aged 5 to 11 years old produced real and nonce multisyllabic words embedded in carrier phrases. Acoustic measures of inter-segment duration (within-word, between-word) and average f0 across segments were extracted. Children with CAS exhibited significantly longer inter-segment durations both within and between words, influenced by lexical stress position (first syllable, second syllable) and word status (real, nonce). They also showed shallower f0 declination slopes than TD peers, indicating reduced overall pitch fall. Segmentation and declination were not significantly correlated, suggesting distinct mechanisms underlying timing and pitch organization. Consistent with prior work, segmentation was greatest for nonce words with non-initial stress. Reduced declination in CAS may reflect limitations in prosodic planning or programming at the intonational level. These findings highlight dissociable disruptions in timing and pitch patterning in CAS, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of prosodic control in motor speech disorders.