Learners of English as a foreign/Second Language (EFL/ESL) can easily learn the correct pronunciation of English words. Linguists have tried to simplify English phonology in general, and English accent in particular, over the past 50 years or so; some scholars have talked about four degrees of primary, secondary, tertiary and weak stress (e.g.,…

Learners of English as a foreign/Second Language (EFL/ESL) can easily learn the correct pronunciation of English words, some linguists have tried to simplify English phonology in general, and English accent in particular, over the past 50 years or so; some scholars have talked about four degrees of primary, secondary, tertiary and weak stress…

In a recent article, Aichert and Ziegler (2004) explore whether apraxia of speech (AOS) can be explained by disruption of the phonetic plans for high frequency syllables. This approach is a hybrid one, combining the notion of a mental syllabary with an explanation that the impairment in AOS results from reduced access to supra-segmental phonetic…

Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as…

This paper presents a single-subject case study illustrating the need to closely examine effects of dialect from syllable position on l-colouring, and the effects of domain-initial strengthening in General American English. Most investigators report lighter /l/ tokens in syllable onsets and darker tokens in coda positions in isolated words. The…

Within the field of second language acquisition, the acquisition of phonetics and phonology has generally taken a back seat to studies of morphological and syntactical acquisition. Although the lacuna is slowly being remedied by a growing interest in the phenomena of second language (L2) phonology, investigations into the acquisition of…

This paper begins by distinguishing phonology (the study of the systematic nature of the inter-relations of sounds in a language) from phonetics (the attempt to describe completely all the physical properties of an utterance). It is shown how in any language some properties of sounds are intuitively more relevant to the grammar and functioning of…

The "rhythmic group" in French (noun group or verb group) is described with examples. The aim is to find some relation between the morphophonological phenomena such as "liaison" occurring within such rhythmic groups and the syntactic structure of French. Available from Liber Laeromedel, Box 1205, S-22105 Lund, Sweden. (TL)

Discusses trends and developments in generative phonology; metatheory and evidence in phonology; and segments, features, and marking. (RL)

Experiments were conducted to examine the influence of syntactic boundaries on the operation of a phonological rule in speech production. Results indicate that traditional metrics of boundary strength, as well as linguistic formulations of phonological rules, must be elaborated to recognize the special status of clause boundaries and deletion…

Examines previously published experimental work on rhythm of spoken Spanish to establish whether or not Spanish is a "syllable-timed" language. Analyzes figures from the experiments and concludes that Spanish is neither stress-timed nor syllable-timed, displaying an antirhythmic pattern where each segment has a "standard duration" dependent on its…

It is acknowledged that contrast plays an important role in understanding discourse and information structure. While it is commonly assumed that contrast can be marked by intonation only, our understanding of the intonational realization of contrast is limited. For German there is mainly introspective evidence that the rising theme accent (or…

The following three levels of intonation are described, and their relationship is discussed: 1) a concrete and atomistic level of the perceptually relevant pitch movements, 2) a concrete and global level of the audible pitch contours and the measurable fundamental frequency curves, and 3) an abstract and global level of intonation patterns.…

Discusses Helmut Richter's work on prosody. Looks at the problems of spoken language perception as belonging not only to phonetics and acoustics but also to psychology. (Text is in German.) (TL)

This article discusses reasons for explicit pronunciation instruction, despite the continued neglect of this area in the communicative classroom. "ACTFL/NCATE Program Standards for the Preparation of Foreign Language Teachers (2002)" and "Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century" (National Standards, 1999) dictate that teachers…