While much research has examined second language (L2) phonetic acquisition, less research has examined first language (L1) attrition in terms of the voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops. The current study examined L2 acquisition and L1 attrition in the VOT of word-initial voiceless stops among late English-Arabic and Arabic-English bilinguals…

To avoid potential miscommunication resulting from structural ambiguity, speakers and listeners often rely on differences in prosodic realization. For instance, the sentence "Jennifer blackmailed the boss of the clerk [who was dishonest"][subscript RC'] is realized with different prosody depending on the attachment of the relative clause…

Infants in their first year manifest selective patterns of discrimination between languages and between accents of the same language. Prosodic differences are held to be important in whether languages can be discriminated, together with the infant's familiarity with one or both of the accents heard. However, the nature of the prosodic cues that…

Some syllables are louder, longer and stronger than other syllables at the lexical level. These prominent prosodic characteristics of certain syllables are captured by suprasegmental features including fundamental frequency, duration and intensity. A language like English uses fundamental frequency, duration and intensity to distinguish stressed…

What are the effects of experience on subsequent learning? We explored the effects of language-specific word order knowledge on the acquisition of sequential conditional information. Korean and English adults were engaged in a sequence learning task involving three different sets of stimuli: auditory linguistic (nonsense syllables), visual…

Presents details of research on intonation in New Zealand English that demonstrate the existence of measurable and reliable speaker-sex differences in pitch measures. Two main factors are considered: the use of a perceptual scale for pitch and the nature of the tasks used to collect the speech data. (Author/VWL)

An analysis of English intonation focuses on fall-rise and rise-fall instruction. Fall-rise intonation marks material from which the speaker would derive a precondition for what he is saying, while rise-fall intonation marks material from which the speaker would derive a consequence from what he is saying based on inversion of the clause where the…

A series of phonetic production and perception experiments were designed to describe the phonological or phonetic domains of two effects in spoken English: final lengthening, generally interpreted as a mark for the edge of some linguistically-defined unit of speech production, and stress-timed shortening, generally interpreted as evidence for…

Revised version of a paper delivered at the Second Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, Gainesville, Florida, October 30 - November 1, 1969. (VM)

Analysis of speech samples from British female adults (N=8) revealed that the subjects increased vocal pitch when addressing young children, but not as much as previously studied North American subjects did. Pitch increases were more commonly observed in free speech than in reading-aloud conditions. (23 references) (Author/CB)

THIS ARTICLE, BASED ON A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF AMERICAN ENGLISH AND CHINESE, IS DESIGNED TO BE USED IN THE PREPARATION OF INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS FOR THE PRESENTATION OF QUESTIONS IN THE TEACHING OF CHINESE. QUESTIONS CAN BE CLASSIFIED INTO THREE CATEGORIES, ACCORDING TO THEIR FUNCTIONS--(1) PURE QUESTIONS, (2) RHETORICAL QUESTIONS, AND (3)…

Presented is a systematic linguistic description of such features as intonation and stress, usually summed up in the phrase "tone of voice." Paying special attention to English, the author has aimed to present as complete a description as possible, and to clarify the theoretical concepts needed to talk precisely about these phenomena. Following…

Allophonic variations in the quality and voicelessness of British English Received Pronunciation /1/ were investigated, largely through their acoustic correlates as revealed by spectrography. (Author/RM)

Considers the fact that prosody is a grammatical (phonological) structure that must be parsed. The article describes prosodic categories marked by intonational pattern for English and Japanese, concentrates on "pitch accent" and tonally marked "phrases," and discusses potential ambiguities in parsing these categories. (60…