Examined large corpus of spontaneous English conversation for pronunciation of "the" and speech patterns immediately following. Found that speakers use "thiy" (versus "thuh") pronunciation to signal immediate suspension of speech to deal with a problem in production; problems were at many levels of production, including articulation, word…

Observations are reported of the pronunciation of English by Japanese immigrants in British Columbia. It is argued that although predictions of syllable pronunciations have been based on vowels, in certain cases whether the hearer will try to retain features of the vowel or consonant is unpredictable. (RM)

Research reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for the investigation of speech, and practical applications of research are included in this status report for the April 1-June 30, 1980, period. The reports deal with the following topics: (1) the perceptual equivalent of two acoustic cues for a speech contrast is specific to phonetic…

Two experiments conducted at the University of Texas at Austin are discussed in this paper. One experiment deals with the production of final syllable lengthening and stress in Spanish and English by native Spanish speakers learning English. The other experiment deals with judgments about the Spanish speakers' production of English by native…

Forty normal children aged 3 and-one-half to 5 and-one-half were tested on the pronunciation of initial /-1/, /-r/, and /s-/ clusters in 120 words, occurring 36, 48, and 42 times, respectively; other phonemes in the cluster occurred from 6 to 18 times. Articulation errors of individual subjects were examined for evidence of (1) degree and type of…

This article intends to shed light on the somewhat nebulous term "basis of articulation," which is used frequently in Eastern European phonetic and linguistic literature but highly neglected in contemporary American literature. In a historical approach, it is shown how the term originated and developed, how it is defined by various authors, and…

Describes a prototype electronic device that may be used in the classroom or in the laboratory to display pedagogical models and student articulations of target language sounds simultaneously. (Author/AM)

Describes a study of young children's production of novel words serving as names of objects and actions, which were matched according to consonant and syllable structure. On each measure, accuarate production of new consonants was greater for the object words, possibly because action words have greater semantic complexity than object words. (SED)

The magnitudes and patterns of two-point difference limens (DL) of the tongue were studied in children with and without articulation errors. Many children with misarticulation of /r/ had DLs that differed in magnitude and pattern from those of children with normal articulation and those with misarticulations of /s/. (NCR)

Investigates the incidence of segmental and prosodic contrasts in recorded sentence materials and the use of such distinctions in the processing of utterances. The chosen materials involve sites of parsing ambiguity. Results show that in the immediate interpretation of spoken language input, intonational contrasts function as clear structural…

The aim of this paper is to summarise how pronunciation feedback on the phoneme level should be given in computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) in order to be effective. The study contains a literature survey of feedback in the language classroom, interviews with language teachers and their students about their attitudes towards…

A study investigated the realization of voicing contrasts ("breathiness") in plosive consonants produced by young French adults, particularly as they differ in males and females. Data came from acoustic analysis of recordings of nine informants reading lists of monosyllabic words with initial plosive consonants in isolation and in the content,…

A research project was undertaken to investigate the acquisition of the English sound system by kindergarten children of various first language backgrounds. Sixteen children were selected from three kindergartens in Prince Rupert, British Columbia according to the following criteria: (1) no English was spoken by parents; (2) the child scored 3 or…

A study examined final vowel qualities in the speech of seven English speakers from the urban Tyneside area of England. It focused on variations in the pronunciation of the final "y" (e.g., city, happy, tiny) and their explanation by way of (1) the resonance characteristics associated with the articulatory gesture, (2) the…