A study that compared the receptive and expressive prosodic abilities of 30 Dutch children (ages 4-6) with language impairments to the abilities of typical children, found they performed less accurately on a prosodic imitation task but did not differ on an emotion identification task. Children performed better with increasing age. (Author/CR)

This study examines the perception of paralinguistic intonational meanings deriving from Ohala's Frequency Code (Experiment 1) and Gussenhoven's Effort Code (Experiment 2) in British English and Dutch. Native speakers of British English and Dutch listened to a number of stimuli in their native language and judged each stimulus on four semantic…

To determine whether gender differences exist in paralinguistic perception, 31 male and 59 female college students listened to an audiotape on which emotions were conveyed through ambiguous verbal statements and then indicated their perceptions of the conveyed emotions. Statistical analyses of the student responses in relation to students'…

Native language affects the perception of segmental phonetic structure, of stress, and of semantic and pragmatic effects of intonation. Similarly, native language might influence the perception of similarities and differences among intonation contours. To test this hypothesis, a cross-language experiment was conducted. An English utterance was…

This article presents a very general survey of tracks and trends in music education research in Germany and its roots in the 19th century, where the beginning of empirical music psychology can be traced back to "Tonpsychologie" and perception research of scholars such as Helmholtz, Stumpf, Wundt, and Wellek. Focus areas that are…

Infants parse speech into word-sized units according to biases that develop in the first year. One bias, present before the age of 7 months, is to cluster syllables that tend to co-occur. The present computational research demonstrates that this statistical clustering bias could lead to the extraction of speech sequences that are actual words,…

This report covers research conducted between July 1972 and March 1973. Experiments were conducted on the automatic detection of constituent boundaries and location of stressed syllables by analysis of fundamental frequency and energy contours, for recordings of six talkers reading the Rainbow Script, two talkers reading a paragraph composed of…

Recent studies of rising intonation contours in French, in particular the acoustical differences that serve to distinguish Yes/No questions from other rising intonations are reviewed. The preliminary results of a pilot study of rising intonations in French, in which average curves were obtained from spectrographic measurements of fundamental…

This paper describes the development of materials to test English language skills and discusses some of the procedures and rationale which were employed in that development. The materials were designed for use in the New Canadian Study (1967-68), which was concerned primarily with the school success of students who learned English as a second…

The research reported in these papers covers a variety of communication problems. The first paper covers research on sound navigation by the blind and involves echo perception research and relevant aspects of underwater sound localization. The second paper describes a research program in acoustic phonetics and concerns such related issues as…

We describe two experiments on signaling and detecting uncertainty in audiovisual speech by adults and children. In the first study, utterances from adult speakers and child speakers (aged 7-8) were elicited and annotated with a set of six audiovisual features. It was found that when adult speakers were uncertain they were more likely to produce…

The dominant trend in phonetics today--due to a large extent to generative phonology--is to discover the brain mechanisms underlying the observed behavior in speech. Among other things there is interest in attempting to find out how motor programs are stored latently, selected, activated into muscular contractions, controlled, and tailored for…

The ten papers in this collection are based on presentations given during a colloquium held November 14-15, 1969, at the University of Toronto. The papers, written in either English or French, cover various topics related to prosodic feature analysis in general; several concern the analysis of specific languages. General topics include discussions…

A study to assess the feasibility of the use of low frequencies for teaching foreign language to the hearing impaired is described. The subjects were unimpaired Japanese students, aged 18 and 19, in beginning French language study. Recorded sentences translated into English, French, and Mandarin Chinese were combined in various ways and presented…

This book serves as a guide for the native and non-native speaker of English in overcoming various problems in articulation, rhythm, and intonation. It is also useful in group therapy speech programs. Forty-five practice chapters offer drill materials for all the vowels, diphthongs, and consonants of American English plus English stress and…