This paper presents a comparative analysis of the sounds in American English and Brazilian Portuguese in order to focus on the problems that Brazilian students may encounter when learning to speak English. The comparative analysis of the consonants, vowels, and diphthongs describes how a given sound is pronounced in both languages. Particular…

This textbook has been designed for courses in practical phonetics for beginning students. The point of view is that general phonetics is a primary skill of great importance to language students who want to acquire a fluent and accurate spoken mastery of a language in adulthood, as well as to linguists who need it as a basic tool of their…

Review of neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic research regarding older (over 40 years of age) second language learners suggests classroom implications for dealing with this population's pronunciation problems and ways to capitalize on their superiority to younger students in terms of higher order linguistic processing. (CB)

Language students at the intermediate level can often read and write but cannot speak the target language. This hinders the student from developing what is usually the most sought-after skill: the ability to speak a foreign language. Students in the third and fourth years of language study are capable of speaking as well as they read and write.…

Recent research in experimental phonetics seems to provide evidence for a clear division between language units and speech units. Many researchers have suggested that the consonant-vowel (CV) syllable may be a universal unit of speech production and perception, while language units become criterial only at higher levels of processing. In second…

This book is intended to be an introduction to the sound system of the Spanish language. The book is descriptive in nature and presents a true picture of the language as it is spoken by native speakers from a wide variety of dialect zones. The book is divided into five parts and 25 chapters. Part one, Phonetics and Phonology," includes the…

A study of the factors affecting the burring of word-initial /r/ in a small English village found variability in the temporal, spatial, social, sexual, and phonic aspects of usage. Six categories of burrers are distinguished according to their speech habits. The evidence points to an ongoing socially and phonetically conditioned change in the…

Theoretical considerations of phoneme construction were explored and a study was made of phoneme efficiency for deaf communication in Finland which utilized 128 deaf pupils (77 boys and 51 girls from grades 3 to 8 and from ages 8 to 15). The main factors of defective production were found in visual reception. It was concluded that, on the average,…

This issue is devoted to first language acquisition. It includes twelve papers concerning: the acquisition of liquids ("1" and "r"); creative errors in the written syntax of deaf children; theoretical and methodological problems in the acquisition of phonology, illustrated from Greek and English: the basis of articulation; the philosophy of…

This programed, self-instructional course has the following terminal objectives: (1) to present some notions of the science of linguistics and the major branches of linguistics, (2) to teach the segmental and suprasegmental phonemes of French, (3) to identify the major articulatory problems of French for the native speaker of English, (4) to…

The work itself should help a person who is going to teach reading and writing. Practical suggestions are offered in the final two chapters, while the opening three give intellectual perspectives. A theme binds the work of letting the consciousness of writing as a visual system be increased and of breaking the spell by which letter phonetics can…

This paper points out some linguistic and stylistic features of Black English as spoken by children and discusses the occurrence of particular language patterns. Examples of distinct intonation patterns, paralinguistic effects, language rhythm, and other phonological features are all considered. A statistical survey of particular age-group usage…

In a study of the detection of test item bias, Chinese speakers and Spanish speakers were administered a measure of pronunciation accuracy for the (d) and (z) morphemes. Six indices were calculated for each item: item difficulty, point biserial correlation coefficient, item variance, chi-square, Rasch logit of difficulty, and the average…

The articulatory awareness task, which was found by Griffiths and Frith (2002) to discriminate ex-dyslexic from non-dyslexic adults, was given to three groups of Japanese college students with different English reading abilities. Two unexpected results emerged: (1) Articulatory awareness performance was generally poor across the groups, thereby…

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 January 1 - March 31, 1979 period. The reports deal with the following topics: an articulatory synthesizer for perceptual research; the perception of an oral-nasal continuum…