Defines speech melody, with special attention to the distinction between its prosodic and paralinguistic domains. Discusses the role of the prosodic characteristics (stress, center, juncture, pitch direction, pitch height, utterance unit, and utterance group) in producing meaning in speech. (JMF)

Reports on a study which explored the intonational differences between constant plus variable utterances and variable plus variable utterances, and which sought to use intonation to resolve the lexical additive vs syntactic representation of beginning productions. (AM)

An analysis was made of the correspondence between intonation and the larger and smaller movements accompanying two-syllable and longer utterances. Synchrony between peaks of intonation and movement pattern was found and is used to argue for a performative basis for early two-word productions. (Author/EJS)

Reports a study that involved the observation of string instrumentalists' performances in an effort to understand the various influences on the ability to perform with accurate intonation. Suggests that further investigation relative to the temporal aspects of intonation performances might be relevant to music education. (KO)

Listeners judged whether they heard a terminal fall, rise, or a flat final intonation contour in 9 sentences produced by 8 deaf children, aged 8-18. The more slowly the contour fell, the more likely listeners were to perceive the contour as flat, regardless of the amount by which it fell. (Author/JDD)

Analysis of speech samples from British female adults (N=8) revealed that the subjects increased vocal pitch when addressing young children, but not as much as previously studied North American subjects did. Pitch increases were more commonly observed in free speech than in reading-aloud conditions. (23 references) (Author/CB)

Attempts to formulate an appropriate linguistic generalization for the occurrence of inhibited periodic eyeblinking by fluent American Sign Language (ASL) signers. It is shown that signers' eyeblinks are sensitive to syntactic structure, from which intonational phrases may be derived. (19 references) (MDM)

This study examined falling tone and final syllable lengthening in the spontaneous speech of 10 4-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI). The falling tone was observed in 9 of the 10 SLI children, despite deficits in segmental phonology, morphosyntax, and mean length of utterance, suggesting a possible dissociation between…

A sociolinguistic, semantic analysis of intonation was conducted on a 15-minute natural interaction between an aphasic speaker, his wife, and his neighbor. Findings indicated the neighbor made more use of two dimensions of intonation, specifically pitch movements referring to shared information and marked tones, when addressing the aphasic speaker…

The purpose of this research was to examine the effect of harmonic accompaniment on the tonal achievement and tonal improvisations of young children. The specific problems of this study were the following: (1) Does the addition of a root melody accompaniment to song instruction affect the tonal achievement of children in kindergarten and first…

The dominant viewpoint regarding phonologically driven speech errors is that segments are the units responsible behind the errors. The goal of this paper is to illustrate the point that other potential candidates for explaining these speech errors, which have gone largely unnoticed, provide a better explanatory framework for speech errors than do…

In the present experiment, the authors tested Mandarin and English listeners on a range of auditory tasks to investigate whether long-term linguistic experience influences the cognitive processing of nonspeech sounds. As expected, Mandarin listeners identified Mandarin tones significantly more accurately than English listeners; however,…