Intonation is an integral part of communication for all speakers. But can sign languages have intonation? A new study shows that signers use their faces to create intonational ‘melodies’ just as ...

A spoken language is more than just words and sounds. Speakers use changes in pitch and rhythm, known as prosody, to provide emphasis, show emotion, and otherwise add meaning to what they say. In a ...

Raúl Sánchez and Dan Bullock are linguistics and communications specialists and NYU professors. They say improving vocalics, aka nonverbal aspects of speech, is key for effective communication. Vocal ...

The distinctive sounds of a newborn's first cries may be influenced by the mother tongue of its parents. A new study of over a thousand recorded cries from 30 French newborns and 30 German newborns ...

Have you ever noticed that a natural conversation flows like a dance—pauses, emphases, and turns arriving just in time? A new study has discovered that this isn't just intuition; there is a biological ...

This paper reports on an acoustic analysis of the intonational patterns of declarative questions and wh-questions produced by a group of young adults residing in a rural town of south-central Spain.

This paper identifies modern Yiddish intonation patterns for three different semantic structures and contends that they derive from modern (Ashkenazic) talmudic chant. An examination of the ...

When we read, it’s very easy for us to tell individual words apart: In written language, spaces are used to separate words from one another. But this is not the case with spoken language – speech is a ...