Children don t utter their first words until they are about 1 year old, but already at birth they can tell some utterances in their native language from utterances in languages with different prosodic features.
12.
"Heavenly Questions " shares the prosodic features typical of " Shijing " : four character lines, a predominant tendency toward rhyming quatrains, and occasional alternation by using weak ( unstressed ) line final syllables in alternate lines.
13.
Research by Crystal emphasized the importance of making generalizations about intonation based on authentic, unscripted speech, and the roles played by prosodic features such as tempo, pitch range, loudness and rhythmicality in communicative functions usually attributed to intonation.
14.
It has been proposed that prosodic features such as the strength of certain sounds, relative to their location in the word, can be used to break apart and identify fragments within the speech stream, in order to differentiate between potentially ambiguous sentences.
15.
Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, it is important to be aware that functions attributed to intonation such as the expression of attitudes and emotions, or highlighting aspects of grammatical structure, almost always involve concomitant variation in other prosodic features.
16.
Just as speech contains nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, including voice quality, rate, pitch, volume, and speaking style, as well as prosodic features such as rhythm, environmental conditions where communication takes place, physical characteristics of the communicators, and behaviors of communicators during interaction.
17.
Written Danish is relatively close to the other Continental Scandinavian languages, but the sound developments of spoken Danish include reduction and assimilation of consonants and vowels, as well as the prosodic feature called " st�d " in Danish, developments which have not occurred in the other languages ( though the " st�d " corresponds to the different tones in Norwegian and Swedish, which are tonal languages ).
