Applying generative morphophonological analysis to the teaching of French morphology, this paper proposes a cohesive and systematic presentation of inflection based on the spoken language. It argues that French verb and adjective stems fall into two classes, variable and invariable, and that a single morphological rule accounts for alternations of…

Acoustic analyses, along with perceptual ratings, measured the extent to which preschoolers imitated three modeled intonation contours (declarative, interrogative, and monotone). Results indicated that five-year-old children imitated modeled contours more frequently than did three-year-old children, with between-group differences largely because…

Investigated functional differences between the accent-lending rise followed by sustained level pitch (10) and combined accent-lending rise and final rise (12) in Dutch. Thirty individuals were presented with short utterances bearing either a 10 or 12 contour. Results indicated that 10 is not readily interpreted as a question, so 10 may help…

Examined mandibular correlates of prosodic control in nonread dialog exchange involving repeated corrections. Articulatory and acoustic data were collected from four American English speakers at an x-ray laboratory, measuring jaw opening. Results suggested a local and global use of the jaw-opening gesture to produce both linguistic or…

A study investigated prosodic variables of syllable stress and intonation contours in speech produced during the simultaneous communication (SC) of ten hearing sign language users. Results indicated longer sentence duration for SC than speech only conditions. Vowel duration and frequency differences between stressed and unstressed syllables were…

Sought to determine whether two low-rising intonation contours should be accepted as distinct patterns in American English, alongside three other widely accepted contours. Dialogues varying only in their intonation contour were presented in a random order to 47 speakers of Midwestern American English. Subjects interpreted the meaning of the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate vibrato performance of university student and high school string players. Forty violinists and cellists performed an eight-measure passage both with and without vibrato. Analyses indicated that the mean rate of vibrato was approximately 5.5 Hz, with no significant differences between instruments or…

A harmonic that begins before the other harmonics contributes less than they do to vowel quality. This reduction can be partly reversed by accompanying the leading portion with a captor tone. This effect is usually interpreted as reflecting perceptual grouping of the captor with the leading portion. Instead, it has recently been proposed that the…

Fourteen native speakers of German heard normal sentences, sentences which were either lacking dynamic pitch variation (flattened speech), or comprised of intonation contour exclusively (degraded speech). Participants were to listen carefully to the sentences and to perform a rehearsal task. Passive listening to flattened speech compared to normal…

Progress in understanding brain/behavior relationships in adult-acquired dysprosody has led to models of cortical hemispheric representation of prosodic processing based on functional (linguistic vs affective) or physical (timing vs pitch) parameters. These explanatory perspectives have not been reconciled, and also a number of neurobehavior…

High functioning children with autism and age and intelligence matched controls participated in experiments testing perception of pitch intervals and musical contours. The finding from the interval study showed superior detection of pitch direction over small pitch distances in the autism group. On the test of contour discrimination no group…

The present study was designed to examine the production of the Swedish tonal accents in children with language impairment and normal controls in order to verify previous findings. The productions of 25 children with linguistic impairment and their matched controls, aged 4; 4-10; 0 (mean age 5;11) were evaluated by ratings of fundamental frequency…

A comparison of the contour alignment of nuclear and initial prenuclear accents was carried out for the Irish dialects of Gaoth Dobhair in Ulster (GD-U) and Cois Fharraige in Connaught (CF-C). This was done across conditions where the number of unstressed syllables following the nuclear and preceding the initial prenuclear accents was varied from…

There are reasons to believe that infant-directed (ID) speech may make language acquisition easier for infants. However, the effects of ID speech on infants' learning remain poorly understood. The experiments reported here assess whether ID speech facilitates word segmentation from fluent speech. One group of infants heard a set of nonsense…

Key elements that affect pronunciation are outlined in this supplement to an adult literacy newsletter. Emphasis is on what students need to know about sounds, stress, intonation, and fluency in order to improve their spoken English. Suggestions are offered for identifying students' needs. Exercises are also provided for practicing sounds, word…