Described in this speech are eight types of auditory discrimination commonly encountered by English speakers in French phonemes and word groups. Representative exercises, designed specifically for the teaching of French to English-speaking students, are provided for each variety presented. (CW)

APPLIED LINGUISTICS CAN ASSIST TEACHERS OF FRENCH AND SPANISH IN DETECTING ERRORS IN PITCH, INTONATION, RHYTHM, WORD COMBINATION, AND SOUND REPRODUCTION, AS WELL AS IN ENABLING THEM TO DO A PROFESSIONAL JOB OF TEACHING STUDENTS MORE ACCURATE SPEECH HABITS. AS THE TEACHER CONCENTRATES ON THE SOUND OF THE LANGUAGE, HE MUST VALUE THE SIGNIFICANCE OF…

Native English-speaking advanced French students' ability to match the perceptive performance of native-speaking Francophones was investigated. The results suggest that linguistic competence may be based on perception and production and that biological constraints in adult language learning may be a psychomotor rather than a psycholinguistic…

Behavioral data establish a dramatic change in infants' phonetic perception between 6 and 12 months of age. Foreign-language phonetic discrimination significantly declines with increasing age. Using a longitudinal design, we examined the electrophysiological responses of 7- and 11-month-old American infants to native and non-native consonant…

A study was conducted to examine school achievement in English and its relationship to personality, intelligence, motivation, and auditory ability factors. This report is a continuation of a previous one (Leino 1972) in which the relationships of personality and intelligence to foreign language teaching were investigated. The population studied…

A study of the effectiveness of music and rhythm used in classroom activities as a technique for developing short-term memory for phonological learning had as subjects 25 adult Cambodian, Lao, Hmong, and Vietnamese immigrants, students in a course in English as a second language. The subjects were given a pretest of their ability to distinguish…

This study examines the perception of English vowels by native speakers of Italian. In two preliminary experiments, Italian university students who had lived in Canada for 3 months were found to have difficulty discriminating because they often identified both members of each contrast as instances of a single Italian vowel. The participants in two…

The lessons in this workbook are intended to supplement existing taped materials in the French Basic Course. Emphasis is placed on creative activities, realistic situations, and authentic speech variations. The materials can be used for self-study purposes as well as in a language laboratory under the guidance of an instructor. The units in this…

DESIGNED AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION FOR PROFESSIONALS PREPARING INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS, PLANNING COURSES, OR DEVELOPING CLASSROOM TECHNIQUES FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE PROGRAMS, A SERIES OF STUDIES HAS BEEN PREPARED THAT CONTRASTS, IN TWO VOLUMES FOR EACH OF THE FIVE MOST COMMONLY TAUGHT FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN THE UNITED STATES, THE SOUND AND GRAMMATICAL…

This is the first half of a two-part study of psychopedagogical problems in the language laboratory. A study of technical problems will follow. Major attention is directed to divisions of work (unities, elements, and phases), deferred comparison, deferred master control, audio-active feedback, the acquisition of new auditive processes, elimination…

Teaching pronunciation is more like gymnastics than linguistics because it involves converting a series of mental processes into motor activity. Many variables contribute to the facility with which a student will learn pronunciation, but age causes the greatest variation in standards of pronunciation learning between individuals. Though increased…

Twenty-one students in their second quarter of Romanian language study at The Ohio State University completed a language background survey, took a perception test and made a tape recording of their pronunciations of a list of Romanian words. The tape used in the perception test consisted of a list of fifteen minimal pairs with initial voiceless or…

THIS DOCUMENT IS THE FIRST IN A SERIES REPORTING ON PROGRESS OF AN EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH PROGRAM IN SPEECH CONTROL. THE TOPICS DISCUSSED ARE--(1) THE DISCONTINUITY OF AUDITORY DISCRIMINATION LEARNING IN HUMAN ADULTS, (2) DISCRIMINATIVE CONTROL OF CONCURRENT RESPONSES--THE RELATIONS AMONG RESPONSE FREQUENCY, LATENCY, AND TOPOGRAPHY IN AUDITORY…

By means of the Kay Elementrics Visi-Pitch and a split screen, students are able to compare their voice traces with the model's, thereby seeing prosodic, phonemic, and allophonic distinctions they were unable to hear. (PMJ)