A large study of 800 adults shows that pragmatic language skills—the ability to understand sarcasm, indirect requests, tone, ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

Tonal languages are different from non-tonal languages because tonal languages are dependent on the emphasis and pronunciation, because how a word is said will affect its meaning. It is quite ...

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 ...