A study of the utterances of young children, aged 7 to 22 months, is described. These utterances, varying in length from one to 17 syllables, contain only suprasegmental information because the verbal content was incomprehensible to hearers who were not acquainted with the child and the situation in which the utterances occured. In the corpus,…

Under the assumption that, with the exception of certain learned, retarded, and borrowed words, the bulk of any language undergoes sound changes that are regular over any given geographical area, over any given time span, and in any given sound environment, these sound changes have been reduced to logical terms and have been programmed to generate…

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)

This study examined the speech behavior of Japanese women when interacting with young children. Sixty-one single Japanese-speaking women, ages 18-26, were recorded as they read aloud picture books to a 1-year-old child and as they conversed with another Japanese-speaking adult woman. When their utterances were acoustically compared between the two…

Discusses secondary stress in various types of words (e.g., in certain parts of speech, with certain spelling patterns, etc.) and in various kinds of sentences and communicative situations. (KM)

The recitation of a nineteenth century Swahili poem is analyzed for the devices in spoken Swahili used by the performer to keep the audience's attention. The poem has a very formal structure in both rhyme, rhythm, and words linking one stanza to the next, giving it great rigidity. The primary focus of the analysis is on three variables:…

This article proposes a California Penutian etymology for two distinct roots meaning "two," and shows some of the transformations of morphological material which have characterized innovations in language subgroups related to California Penutian. This provides important evidence for the history of California Penutian. (CLK)

A structural analysis provides new evidence concerning the internal structure of the syllable in Wolof, a West African language, through examination of the secret code called Kall, spoken mainly in Senegal's Ceneba area. It is proposed that Kall is better described as involving primarily a reduplication of the prosodic word. The first section…

An acoustic study of German focused on voice frequency at sentence-, turn-, and discourse-end in conversations. The data were drawn from short dialogues in which the same word occurs at the ends of utterances, in the middle of a turn, at the end of a turn, and at the end of a discourse. The dialogues were read 10 times by a male and a female…

The relationship between the rhythms of spoken language and the rhythms of other human behavior is examined in terms of: (1) types of rhythmic structures observed, (2) rate of succession of rhythmic units, (3) a perceptual tendency equalization of physically unequal intervals, and (4) the variability of rhythmic motor action. (Author/RM)

An investigation of Russian surnames reveals a system in which pronunciation is largely determined by two sets of factors. The author considers in detail the relationship between the stress in a surname and the stress in a word from which the name is derived and also the relationship between the stress in surnames and their "endings" as they are…

This article presents an outline for a seminar in English intonation for language teachers. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Halle & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical…

In two eye-tracking experiments the role of contrastive pitch accents during the on-line determination of referents was examined. In both experiments, German listeners looked earlier at the picture of a referent belonging to a contrast pair ("red scissors," given "purple scissors") when instructions to click on it carried a…

A study describing Finnish phonetics and analyzing prosodic properties is reported. Subjects were two female 17-year-olds, speakers of standard Finnish and well acquainted with each other. Data were drawn from two sources: a conversation between the two, in which one described a picture so the other could draw it, and one a set of stories narrated…