Reviews the construct of speech intelligibility as expounded by Cathford half a century ago in a landmark treatise and in the collaborative efforts of Smith, Nelson, and Rafiqzad to examine its relevance to intercultural communication in a new millennium beset by the contradictory global tensions of homogeneity and fragmentation. (Author/VWL)

In order to teach reading effectively to students who use a nonstandard dialect, the teacher must accept and understand the systems and patterns of that dialect. He can then help his students avoid the characteristics of their dialect which lead to confusion in communication, promote their accurate decoding of standard English as they learn to…

A summary of the study of false cognates by Koessler and Derocquigny. The following topics are studied: The origin and meaning of the term; a classification according to monosemy or polysemy; false cognates on the multilingual level and in language families; and extensions of meaning. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

The concept of language barrier has its derivations in the fields of dialectology, sociology and psychology. In contemporary usage however, the concept has two meanings i.e. regional-cultural barrier and socio-cultural barrier. (Text is in German.) (DS)

Paper based on PhD dissertation submitted to the University of Michigan. Research supported by OEC-3-6-061784-0508.

Different languages code messages in different ways and use different channels for sending messages; thus there are many places for misinterpreting and mishearing messages in an intercultural context. To move from one language to another requires a description of the total language communication system, one that has its universals in social and…

Clozentropy procedure is a method whereby researchers pretest messages to determine their levels of comprehensibility among given audience members. It is often used to measure the English language proficiency of foreign students. The procedure utilizes a passage of prose from which words are deleted on either a random or systematic basis and…

Misinformation and ambiguity as features of social communication in Northern Thai villages are examined. The questions of how well Northern Thai villagers understand each others' verbal communications, and how accurate their statements actually are, are considered. (Author/RM)

This study found that there are striking similarities between the pattern of interruptions in male-female interchanges and those observed in the adult-child transactions. (Author)

Investigation of the extent to which recognition of a foreign accent is affected by reducing suprasegmental or segmental information involved the reading of five Dutch sentences by native (N=9) and non-native (N=9) speakers. Results indicated that suprasegmental aspects of speech do play a part in a foreign accent. (CB)

Various types of translation problems in cross-cultural research are translation of questions or other verbal stimuli, vocabulary equivalence, equivalence in idiom, grammar, syntax, and back-translation. (Author/SB)

The status of bilingualism in Cameroon is unusual in that both French and English are foreign languages. Although French seems to be predominant, the official intent is to establish bilingual primary schools to create completely bilingual individuals. This approach is costly, difficult, and perhaps unnecessary. (CHK)