In a ‘very close replication’ study using the same attributes as the original, Chandrashekar et al. (2021) report a failure to replicate some choose–reject problems documented in Shafir (1993). We find that several of the original attributes have changed their valence three decades later, and we compose new versions with updated attributes that fully replicate Shafir’s (1993) original findings. Despite their apparent exactitude, ‘very close replications’ across contexts or time, when stimuli may have changed their meaning or valence, can be highly misleading, further exacerbating replication concerns.

This paper examines the role of prosody in a little-studied type of non-canonical questions: syntactically and lexically canonical interrogative sentences that have been uttered by the speaker in order to express surprise. The study compares Estonian surprise questions with string-identical information-seeking questions elicited by means of context descriptions. The materials comprise 1,008 utterances by 21 speakers.

It is concluded that the prosody of the examined utterances has three roles that are relevant to the expression of surprise by ordinary interrogative sentences. First, the enhanced prosodic realisation of the utterances as manifested in a longer duration, a wider pitch range, and a more frequent occurrence of upstepped pitch accents conveys emotional expressivity. Second, lower pitch along with the creaky voice quality signals that the utterances are not canonical questions, while the main prosodic correlate of information-seeking questions is high pitch. Phonological pitch accents and boundary tones, however, are not used to distinguish between surprise questions and information-seeking questions. Third, the nuclear accent placement signals an information structure that is associated with the expression of incongruity or counterexpectation: the focal accent can evoke an alternative (set) that arises from the speaker’s expectations.

Previous research has suggested that the production of speech rhythm in a second language (L2) or foreign language is influenced by the speaker’s first language rhythm. However, it is less clear how the production of L2 rhythm is affected by the learners’ L2 proficiency, largely due to the lack of rhythm metrics that show consistent results between studies. We examined the production of English rhythm by 75 Korean learners with the rhythm metrics proposed in previous studies (pairwise variability indices and interval measures). We also devised new sentence stress measures (i.e., accentuation rate and accentuation error rate) and investigated whether these new measures can quantify rhythmic differences between the learners. The results found no rhythm metric that significantly correlated with proficiency in the expected direction. In contrast, we found a significant correlation between the learners’ proficiency levels and both measures of sentence stress, showing that less-proficient learners placed sentence stress on more words and made more sentence stress errors. This demonstrates that our measures of sentence stress can be used as effective features for assessing Korean learners’ English rhythm proficiency.

This article focuses on whether determiner omission by two-year-old children isconstrained at the level of the prosodic foot or whether it is a function of thedifferent levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Nine French-speaking children aged2;0 to 2;7 were asked to repeat 54 four- or five-word sentences of the form“Pronoun V NP” with three conditions: a) det + monosyllabicnoun; b) det + bisyllabic noun; c) det + monosyllabic adjective+ monosyllabic noun. The results show 1) more determiner omission incondition b than in a; 2) more determiner omission in c than in b. It is shownthat determiner omission is not accounted for by a low-level stress-alternationconstraint and that the level of prosodic structure to which the determiner isattached plays a role in determiner omission.