Intonation, long thought to be a key to effectiveness in spoken language, is more and more commonly addressed in English language teaching through the use of speech visualization technology. While the use of visualization technology is a crucial advance in the teaching of intonation, such teaching can be further enhanced by connecting technology…

Sound symbolism is the study of the relationship between the sound of an utterance and its meaning. In this interdisciplinary collection of new studies, 24 leading scholars discuss the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. Contributions and authors include the following: "Sound-Symbolic Processes" (Leanne Hinton, Johanna…

A study investigated the validity of three theories in predicting the structure of language tone systems containing level tones. The theories include the following: that (1) phonetic elements are arranged so they are maximally separated in a fixed phonetic space; (2) a system with a larger number of phonetic elements will use a larger phonetic…

The concept of "prominence" in intonation is discussed. It treats the prominence of a syllable as a feature determined by the speaker separate from the word itself, and meaningful in and of itself. The decision by a speaker to assign or not assign prominence to a syllable (selectivity) is seen as related to the immediacy of spoken…

Paper presented at the Annual National Conference on Linguistics (11th, New York, New York March 1966). First published in the BULLETIN OF PROSTHETICS RESEARCH.

This study investigates why researchers have trouble determining when learners acquire inverted and statement forms of yes/no questions. Researchers have difficulty designing studies on this subject because this area of language is not fully rule-governed or systematic. The choice of the form may be based on two speakers' foreknowledge of each…

An informal study of four fourth and fifth grade poor readers was undertaken (1) to compare the repeated reading method of instruction with the method of teaching children to recognize lists of words rapidly and (2) to develop an approach that might be helpful in studying the effects of prosodic cues and their contributions to the repeated reading…

An important feature of the sentence in any language is its thematic structure, new/given information organization. It has been found that in English, where word order is grammatically determined, the thematic structure is signalled by the place of the sentence stress. If an indefinite noun (new information) is present in the sentence, it bears…

Twenty college students participated in an examination of the role of auditory feedback in the encoding of paralinguistic affect by adults. A dependent measure indicating the accuracy of paralinguistic communication of affect was obtained by comparing the level of affect that encoders intended to produce with ratings of vocal intonations from…

This article describes phonological and semantic characteristics associated with the surface structure of some Japanese sentence intonations. The aim of the long-term study is to show the place of intonation in the total system of Japanese grammar. This particular part of the study is limited to the group of intonations which are characterized by…

Infants raised the pitch of their vocalizations when stimulated by vocalizing parents. Nonvocal stimulation did not repeat the effect. Intonation contours did not change during different conditions. The pitch of the parents' vocalizations also rose during vocal interaction. Changes in infant pitch were interpreted as a function of imitation.…

This paper focuses on linguistic prosodic units related to boundaries between syntactic units. Specifically, rules for predicting the location of such boundaries, and factors affecting their location, are discussed. Examples are given on how prosodies can be used for syntactic analysis. Addressing the question of prosodic units and their…

The author reviews some recent theories, experiments, and observations in psychology and psycholinguistics which challenge the basic assumptions of the audio-lingual method of foreign language teaching: Language learning is habit formation, requiring analogy rather than analysis; meaning can be learned only in the matrix of allusions to the…

The introductory section of this study of Spanish dialects in the United States, commissioned by the ERIC Clearinghouse for Linguistics, presents the plan and the ethnic distribution of Spanish speakers in the U.S.. (The 1960 census shows the preponderance of population contribution to be from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Spain.) A description…

This paper deals with methods and models appropriate to the systematic linguistic study of the child's acquisiton of phonology. Sections I through IV present a review of previous studies in the field, discuss the usefulness of the concept of "innateness," discriminate between phonetic and phonological ability, and discuss the concept of discrete…