This paper is concerned with four Scandinavian prosodemes: accent 1, accent 2, stoed, and no stoed. The aim is to establish the function of each of them, i.e., the role they play in the system of each Scandinavian language. Available from Liber Laeromedel, Box 1205, S-22105 Lund, Sweden. (Author/TL)

By examining data on historical changes in pitch accent plus data from present-day speech analysis, the article concludes that suprasegmental changes are in progress in both Japanese and English languages. Although English and Japanese use different phonetic resources to implement accentuation, vacillation in their respective suprasegmental…

This article is a critical review of a number of statistical works, over the past 50 years, dedicated to the determination of the relative frequency of phonemes. (Author/RM)

Field research into the Heiltsuk language, part of the Kwakiutlic branch of the Wakashan language family, in British Columbia is reported. Some of the features of Heiltsuk phonetics are discussed. (RM)

The protocol materials on phonology in black nonstandard dialects prepared for use by a group of elementary teacher trainees are described. The thirteen phonological concepts studied include: (1) free variation of sounds or full phonemes; (2) the loss of the /r/ phoneme, except in initial position in a syllable; (3) the omission of final single…

The influence of syllabic structure, lexical class and stress patterns of known words on the acquisition of the English stress system was investigated in ten native Thai speakers. All participants were adult learners of English with an average length of residence in the US of 1.4 years. They were asked to produce and give perceptual judgments on…

This paper is one of a number of studies within the conceptual framework of natural phonology, according to which phonological processes are of two kinds, context-free and context-sensitive. Context-free changes can be explained by the character of the sounds themselves; context-sensitive processes are explained largely by the function of the…

To account for vowel alternations in forms such as divine-divinity, Chomsky and Halle propose the Vowel Shift Rule and other rules. This study experimentally assesses the psychological validity and generality of these rules by testing the productivity of vowel alternation. Subjects were required, in a meaningful sentence context, to produce a…

The purpose of this book is to describe the phonological and grammatical structures of modern Guarani, as it is spoken today in Asuncion and neighboring regions of Paraguay. An introductory section considers the linguistic classification of Guarani, gives some background on its speakers, and discusses the sources used for this study. Part I,…

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Halle & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical…

Included in the phonology are three contrastive lexical tones, a prepause syllable (as part of intonation), nine oral vowels, four nasal vowels, and many consonant clusters which differ in accordance with their distribution in reference to their place in the word: prestress, stressed syllable, and poststress. (SCC)

This guide to teaching English pronunciation to speakers of other languages begins with sections on stress, rhythm, and intonation. A large section is devoted to specifics of phonetics. Topics covered include vowel and consonant sounds, instructional goals, phonemes and allophones, the phonemic alphabet, pronunciation drills, timing of class…

The stress patterns of Aragonese are examined within the framework of generative phonology, based on data taken from the traditional works of Haensch, Badia Margarit, and Alvar Lopez. Stress placement is shown to be regular. Two sets of rules which account for the data are compared. In the preferred solution, a penultimate stress rule, a rule of…

Pronunciation is reexamined from a "top-down" perspective that shifts the focus of attention in language instruction from individual phonemes to suprasegmentals and other features of the larger context of utterances, including prosody, phonological fluency, voice quality, and gestures. (57 references) (Author/LB)

This book is intended to serve as a practical introduction both to the phonology of English and to the general practices and techniques used in teaching and learning pronunciation. It is written primarily for the teacher who has had little or no formal exposure to the field of linguistics, but who has an interest in becoming acquainted with some…