In English as a Foreign Language (EFL) situations, it is important for educators to improve learners' sound recognition skill due to the variation of English found in the world. Furthermore, perceptual skill is a foundation leading to intelligibility in production. This study examined the effects of using High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT)…

36 Saudi EFL freshmen students took a listening-spelling test in which they filled out 100 blanks in a dialogue. Results indicated that 63% of the spelling errors were phonological and 37% were orthographic. It was also found that the subjects had more phonological problems with whole words but more orthographic problems with graphemes. Some of…

How syntax affects sentence prosody is explored. It is demonstrated that the lengthening of phase-final words and pausing afterward reflect a distinctly prosodic representation in which phonological constituents are arranged in a hierarchical nonrecursive structure. A model of prosodic pronunciation is also presented. (SLD)

In Quiegolani Zapotec (QZ), a language spoken by approximately 3,000 people in Oaxaca, Mexico, words contain minimal consonant clusters of two or even three consonants, and most of these clusters show a decreasing scope of sonority. This violates sonority constraints proposed by Greenberg (1978) and further discussed by Bell and Saka (1983). QZ,…

A series of phonetic production and perception experiments were designed to describe the phonological or phonetic domains of two effects in spoken English: final lengthening, generally interpreted as a mark for the edge of some linguistically-defined unit of speech production, and stress-timed shortening, generally interpreted as evidence for…

The natural phonology theory, related to European structuralism, makes two fundamental assumptions: (1) phonemes are mental images of the sounds of language, and (2) phonological processes represent subconscious mental substitutions of one sound or class of sounds for another that are the natural response to the relative difficulties of sound…

It is generally agreed among French linguists that the word has no phonetic or phonological status in French. This position reflects mostly pedagogical considerations and preoccupation with surface phonetic facts and demarcative signals. Investigation of processes of a more abstract nature reveals, however, that a certain number of rules…

The term generative phonolgy refers to statements, rules or axioms which can produce all but only those well-formed utterances of a language. The goal of this theory is to make precise and explicit the ability of native speakers to produce utterances of a particular language. In generative phonology, the level of the phoneme is redefined to match…

Since the phonic abilities of high school shorthand teachers and students affect the students' mastery of dictation and transcription, a study was conducted (1) to develop a dictation/transcription learning cycle depicting the phoneme/grapheme correspondence in the two processes; (2) to determine the phonetic patterns of correspondence of the…

This study investigated the relationship between perception and production in children's phonological learning to determine whether perceptual confusions could account for the patterns of substitution and deletion found in 2-year-olds' speech. A total of 14 children were presented pairs of toy stimuli, with each pair composed of a familiar item…

A discussion of the nature and process of phonological changes taking places in languages looks specifically at the merging of allophones and the reorganization of phonemes in response to pressures within the phonological system. The hypotheses of economy and reorganization are used to analyze the process of change within a phonological system.…

This paper discusses phonological processes which assign ultimate phonetic realizations to function words. Stress patterns of function words are studied along with phonetic variation between strong and weak forms. The Auxiliary Reduction Rule is extended to account for the phonetic variation. (Author/AM)

Intervocalic features of Villa Mella Spanish, a dialect spoken in a region of Santo Domingo, are reviewed, with particular emphasis on the intervocal "d." (CB)

A study was conducted of the development of consonant clusters in the phonology of a native English-speaking child. His progress was studied over a year and a half period, in three one-month segments. His speech was recorded by tape and transcribed. Techniques used to elicit consonant clusters included real word imitation, imitation of nonsense…

This paper challenges from a practical point of view the idea that the phonemic principle is the most adequate or the optimal theoretical basis for devising a romanized alphabet for a language. In the past, romanization of languages, written or unwritten, have largely been based on the phonemic principle and have unnecessarily burdened the learner…