This paper investigated the relationship of syntactic structure with prosodic and phonological information, focusing on distinctions between early and late closure sentences in terms both of intonational phrasing and of stress placement on stress shift items such as "Hong Kong." Contains 63 references. (MDM)

Argues that English intonational structure and surface syntactic structure are one and can be captured in a single unified grammar. The interpretations that the grammar provides for such constituents corresponds to the entities and open propositions of intonational meaning that have been described as "theme" and "rheme,""given" and "new," and…

Describes an experimental attempt to verify meaning hypotheses for four Dutch single-accent pitch patterns as postulated in the linguistic literature. Results show a distinct effect of orientation on appropriateness of two of the investigated pitch accent types; the other two pitch accent types are associated with predicted context types well…

Human listeners can keep track of statistical regularities among temporally adjacent elements in both speech and musical streams. However, for speech streams, when statistical regularities occur among nonadjacent elements, only certain types of patterns are acquired. Here, using musical tone sequences, the authors investigate nonadjacent learning.…

The article describes the contrastive possibilities of alignment of high accents in three Romance varieties, namely, Central Catalan, Neapolitan Italian, and Pisa Italian. The Romance languages analyzed in this article provide crucial evidence that small differences in alignment in rising accents should be encoded phonologically. To account for…

Today most of the organizations are operated at global level. Thus undeniably there is an overwhelming influence of culture on business. To promote healthy business, study of culture and its relation with language is inevitable. A thorough understanding of cultural differences will pave way for effective transaction at work places and this in turn…

Few attempts have been made to look systematically at the relationship between musical and intonation analysis skills, a relationship that has been to date suggested only by informal observations. Following Mackenzie Beck (2003), who showed that musical ability was a useful predictor of general phonetic skills, we report on two studies…

Prosodic information, such as word stress and speech rhythm, is important in language acquisition, and sensitivity to stress patterns is present from birth onwards. Exposure to prosodic properties of the native language occurs prenatally. Preterm birth and an associated lack of exposure to prosodic information are suspected to affect language…

Results indicated that intonation facilitated recall only in the anomalous sentence condition, suggesting that, in such learning situations, intonation may function as an additional component of grammar, rather than as a linguistic variable. (Author/RB)

Presents a system of stress notation for the Russian adjective which indicates the pattern any given adjective belongs to. (AM)

THIS SKETCH CONSTITUTES A PRELIMINARY STUDY FOR A DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR OF PANJABI, THE LANGUAGE SPOKEN BY NEARLY 30 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE INDIAN AND PAKISTANI PROVINCES OF PUNJAB, AND BY SIKHS AND PANJABI MUSLIMS IN EAST AFRICA. AN INDO-ARYAN LANGUAGE, PANJABI (ALONG WITH HINDI) IS THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE OF EAST PUNJAB, AND THE PRESENT STUDY IS…

This paper reviews Philip Lieberman's "Intonation, Perception, and Language," (Research Monograph No. 38) Cambridge, Massachusetts, M.I.T. Press, 1967. The review is also scheduled to appear in the "Journal of Linguistics." (JD)

An experiment was conducted to gain insight into the demarcative function of stress and intonation by testing the effectiveness of these features in resolving structural ambiguity. The responses of native speakers were analyzed both in the production and in the recognition of 68 pairs of potentially ambiguous sentences. Special care was taken to…

The "rhythmic group" in French (noun group or verb group) is described with examples. The aim is to find some relation between the morphophonological phenomena such as "liaison" occurring within such rhythmic groups and the syntactic structure of French. Available from Liber Laeromedel, Box 1205, S-22105 Lund, Sweden. (TL)

Discusses a study which focused on how well elementary children supply appropriate intonation to written sentences and which found that many intonation patterns predictable by syntax had not been mastered even by children who were reading on fourth and fifth grade levels. (JM)