Discusses the theoretical foundations of discourse analysis and intonation and emphasizes that intonation has received little attention in the communicative competence or proficiency movements, despite the fact that intonation is a powerful tool for negotiating meaning, managing interaction, and achieving discourse coherence. (CB)

Investigates the comprehension of nine intonational contrasts in ten-year-olds and adults. Overall performance on the tasks was much lower among the children than among the adults. Results indicate that hypotheses concerning the chronological order of development of meanings dependent on groupings, nucleus placements, and tones are too simplistic.…

This book is a concise history of structural linguistics, charting its development from the 1870s to the present day. It explains what structuralism was and why its ideas are still central today. For structuralists, a language is a self-contained and tightly organized system whose history is of changes from one state of the system to another. This…

Examines the relationship between accent in language learning and pitch discrimination in music. Research conducted under a grant from the U.S. Office of Education. (DS)

Results suggest that children acquire speech registers concurrently with language and that the progression of acquisition varies more for registers than for grammatical forms. (Author)

Indicates that native and nonnative speakers alike can make use of intonation if they explicitly listen for it, although prosodic features are generally ignored when other cues (semantic and pragmatic) are available. (Author/RL)

A study of tone and accent in Qafar, a Cushitic language characterized by tonal rather than stress accent, modifies an earlier claim made about the relationship between accent and gender. The newer study makes a proposal that simplifies the account of gender in that this category is seen as determined rather than determining. This further suggests…

An analysis of the Dinka (Sudan) vowel system consists of: (1) an overview of Dinka phonological structure, including the phonological sentence, the phonological word, the syllable, and the consonantal and vocalic features of the sound system; (2) an examination of breathy versus nonbreathy vowels, including a review of previous research using a…

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,…

One characteristic of Japanese pitch accent is that there is the so-called "flat" accent, which has no fall or nucleus. This type of accent exists not only in Standard Japanese but in many dialects, including Kyoto. But the flat types are different in the Tokyo and Kyoto dialects. In the Tokyo dialect, the first syllable always has a low…

Two experiments are reported which explore (1) into what categories do native listeners divide the perceived pitch contours of their language; (2) into what perceptual units can these overall contour structures be further broken down; and (3) what is the range of tolerance for each unit? (Author/RM)

Establishes the relationship between linguistic stress and fundamental frequency and the intonation contours in short declarative sentences, interrogative sentences, and nonterminal clauses in Advanced Standard Copenhagen Danish. The work is based on acoustical analyses of recordings by four subjects. (Author/EJS)