Reports a study which illustrates that a listener can anticipate the score of the opposing team in sports match results from the variation in the announcer's intonation. Investigates how reliable this prediction is and what linguistic features it involves. Relates these findings to general problems in intonation contour interpretation. (PMJ)

The "theme-rheme" division leads to certain problems for Germans learning English--e.g., the greater importance of intonation in English, or the freer word-order of German. Various types of errors are discussed (systemic, context, and rule); also pedagogical treatment of "theme-rheme," including precise definition of teaching goals, and…

Analyzes the intonation patterns used in the oral presentation of the news. The aim is to use this analysis to make students more aware of the significance of what they are listening to and to teach them how to make use of such intonation patterns themselves. (Text is in French.) (TL)

Presents a contrastive statement of the potential that intonation has for differentiating identically worded syntactic patterns in English and German. Focuses on tonality, rehearses some well-known examples of tonality contrasts and introduces some less well-known ones as well, both of which provide examples of syntactic distinctions concealed in…

Describes an investigation of the differences and similarities existing between the intonation systems of French and English. The unity of the procedures described here is confirmed by an analysis of intonational errors made by English-speaking learners of French. (Author/VWL)

Twenty different monologues were analyzed; and the interrelating roles that clause relations, lexico-grammatical cohesion, and intonation choices play in creating cohesive monologue were examined. It is argued that these linguistic resources can be exploited by speakers to signal underlying concepts and help listeners interpret the text. (Contains…

Twenty-two hearing-impaired children (ages 9 to 13) with a hearing loss of 80 dB or greater completed 3 tasks of intonation perception and production. Acoustic analysis suggested a relationship between imitation and discrimination of intonation contours and a relationship between imitation and production of orally read sentences when a rising…

This study examined the abilities of adult listeners to discriminate and identify temporal order of sounds presented in tonal sequence. Listeners had either normal hearing or mild to moderate sensorineural hearing losses. In general, older listeners performed more poorly than younger listeners on the discrimination and identification tasks. Order…

A movement called Language Awareness has received some attention in L2 acquisition and foreign language pedagogy circles during the past decade. Language Awareness, according to Donmall (1985), refers to "a person's sensitivity to and conscious awareness of the nature of language and its role in human life" (p. 7). The primary goal of this…

This experiment investigated relational complexity and relational shift in judgments of auditory patterns. Pitch and duration values were used to construct two-note perceptually similar sequences (unary relations) and four-note relationally similar sequences (binary relations). It was hypothesized that 5-, 8- and 11-year-old children would perform…

In learning to perceive and produce speech, children master complex language-specific patterns. Daunting language-specific variation is found both in the segmental domain and in the domain of prosody and intonation. This article reviews the challenges posed by results in phonetic typology and sociolinguistics for the theory of language…

This paper presents patterns of accentual alignment in two varieties of Spanish spoken in the Basque Country: Lekeitio Spanish (LS), with speakers whose other native language is Lekeitio Basque (LB); and Vitoria Spanish (VS), with monolingual speakers of Spanish from the city of Vitoria. These patterns are compared to those of Madrid Spanish (MS),…

This study shows that utterances ending in an extra-clausal response particle provide interesting evidence in favor of the hypothesis that theme-rheme articulation in Norwegian utterances is grammatically underdetermined. First, a review of the approach used in the study of the functions of Norwegian intonational phrasing is provided. In this…

Two studies examined children's perceptual biases in extracting or identifying words from the stream of speech. In one study, evidence for the salience of stressed and final syllables was found. Young children less frequently omitted those syllables from their productions and produced unstressed and nonfinal syllables less accurately. A second…

A glossary was developed by the City of Chicago's Board of Education to assist teachers of English as a second language (ESL) dealing with Vietnamese immigrant children. It contains a list of commonly used English words and lists of key words used in 13 subject areas: art, foreign languages, language arts, library science, mathematics, music,…