This study discusses the nature of rhythm as it may apply to speech and language, reviews some of the literature on the development of rhythm, and presents some thoughts relating these findings to specific examples of children's speech. There is evidence to support the view that one need not look at the exact rhythm of any utterance, but only for…

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…

A literature review pertaining to the teaching and learning of stress and intonation in native and second languages considers the functional movement, conversational English, the difficulty of learning stress/intonation, stress within words and sentences, difficulties for speakers of tone and syllable-timed languages, and tests of stress and…

Discusses similarities and differences between vocal music and spoken language. Uses for vocal music to aid in the phonological instruction of Russian are suggested. (LMO)

This study of 15 Hebrew-speaking preschool children with specific language impairment and 2 comparison groups tentatively supported the notion that grammatical morphemes were less difficult for subjects if they take the form of stressed and/or lengthened syllables and if they appear in a language in which nouns, verbs, and adjectives must be…

This manual, intended for elementary and advanced learners of Spanish who still have pronunciation problems, contains 18 lessons dealing with the pronunciation of vowels, consonants and diphthongs, stress and intonation. Each of the lessons begins with an explanation, in Spanish, of the sound and the way it is pronounced, and includes a variety of…

This book presents an acoustical and physiological Investigation of contemporary standard Arabic as spoken in Iraq. Spectrograms and X-ray sound films are used to perform the analysis for the study. With this equipment, the author considers the vowels, consonants, pharyngealized consonants, pharyngeals and glottals, duration, gemination, and…

This paper examines the problem of whether tonal representation should be considered segmental or suprasegmental. Woo's hypothesis that tone features are to be specified segmentally is discussed as well as Leben's statement that in some languages tone is suprasegmental. The following are criteria suggested as a basis for tonal representation:…

Infants parse speech into word-sized units according to biases that develop in the first year. One bias, present before the age of 7 months, is to cluster syllables that tend to co-occur. The present computational research demonstrates that this statistical clustering bias could lead to the extraction of speech sequences that are actual words,…

This report covers research conducted between July 1972 and March 1973. Experiments were conducted on the automatic detection of constituent boundaries and location of stressed syllables by analysis of fundamental frequency and energy contours, for recordings of six talkers reading the Rainbow Script, two talkers reading a paragraph composed of…

This study is the sixth in the series "Studies in the Phonology of Asian Languages." A phonetic and phonemic analysis of the three complex nuclei of Vietnames (Hanoi dialect), spelled (1) ye-, -ie-, -ia, (2) -u'o'-, -u'a, and (3) -uo-, -ua, was carried out using the sound spectrograph. The relative domains of the target qualities of the…

Recent studies of rising intonation contours in French, in particular the acoustical differences that serve to distinguish Yes/No questions from other rising intonations are reviewed. The preliminary results of a pilot study of rising intonations in French, in which average curves were obtained from spectrographic measurements of fundamental…

This paper examines the validity of the concept of linguistic units in a theory of speech production. Substantiating data are drawn from the study of the speech production process itself. Secondarily, an attempt is made to reconcile the postulation of linguistic units in speech production theory with their apparent absence in the speech signal.…

This pronunciation manual for the study of English as a foreign/second language can be used with beginning as well as intermediate or advanced students. The text is organized in three parts or cycles. Part One is an introduction to selected features of pitch and stress and an inventory of the vowels and consonants, with contextual illustrations of…

This guide provides teachers of Korean children and adults with information on the problems Koreans encounter in learning to pronounce English. Principles of contrastive analysis and error analysis are used to give insight into these pronunciation problems. The first section dealing with problem sounds covers the following: (1) an explanation of…