In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…

Considering the contradictory research on explicit teaching of suprasegmentals, the present study aims to investigate the effects of explicit instruction of L2 English learners' perception of prosodically ambiguous intonation patterns, as well as the possible effects of reported musical familiarity on intonation acquisition. A control group and a…

A comparison of the contour alignment of nuclear and initial prenuclear accents was carried out for the Irish dialects of Gaoth Dobhair in Ulster (GD-U) and Cois Fharraige in Connaught (CF-C). This was done across conditions where the number of unstressed syllables following the nuclear and preceding the initial prenuclear accents was varied from…

This articles discusses intonation in terms of different kinds of contours and demonstrates the inadequacy of any approach to English intonation which treats contours as sequences of significant pitch levels. (NCR)

Spectrographic analysis of two lectures given without notes by Simone de Beauvoir and Margaret Mead allow detailed specification of three forms of intonation characteristic of declarative sentences in English and French. Discussion of the objectives, of analysis procedures, and of results of the study which elaborate on intonational differences…

A detailed, spectrographic analysis of two lectures, given by Diego Rivera and Margaret Mead, which were chosen for their realistic naturalness, permits a graphic presentation and description of the patterns of three types of intonation within the declarative sentence in Spanish and American English. They include a minor continuation (A), major…