The history of Slavic prosody gives an account of Slavic languages at the time of their differentiation and relates these developments to issues in phonological theory. It is first argued that the syllable structure of Slavic changes before the fall of the jers and suggests that intra- and intersyllabic reorganization in Late Common Slavic was far…

The acoustic features and functions of accentuation in French are discussed, and features of accentuation in the speech of French 2-year-olds are explored. The four major acoustic features used to signal accentual distinctions are fundamental frequency of voicing, duration of segments and syllables, intensity of segments and syllables, and…

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)

The morphotonemics of Ganda have been particularly troublesome to linguists trying to describe the tonal structure of Bantu languages. Ganda has three surface tones, and changes in the surface tones parallel changes in grammatical function only part of the time. The author has found that a description of Ganda tones becomes manageable if instead…

The effects of syllable timing and syllable sequence type on vowel sandhi in Spanish are investigated in this paper. It is argued that structuralist and generative treatments of vowel sandhi, which are characterized by generalizations about vowel "shortening" and dropping and glide formation, are inadequate because they focus exclusively…

A study investigated prosodic variables of syllable stress and intonation contours in speech produced during the simultaneous communication (SC) of ten hearing sign language users. Results indicated longer sentence duration for SC than speech only conditions. Vowel duration and frequency differences between stressed and unstressed syllables were…

Stress assignment to three- and four-syllable Italian words is not predictable by rule, but needs lexical look-up. The present study investigated whether stress assignment to low-frequency Italian words is determined by stress regularity, or by the number of words sharing the final phonological segment and the stress pattern (stress neighborhood…

A comparison of the contour alignment of nuclear and initial prenuclear accents was carried out for the Irish dialects of Gaoth Dobhair in Ulster (GD-U) and Cois Fharraige in Connaught (CF-C). This was done across conditions where the number of unstressed syllables following the nuclear and preceding the initial prenuclear accents was varied from…

The article handles nasalization found in Jaffna Tamil. Conclusions are based on the results of a kymographic study of nominal forms occurring in the colloquial speech of the author. Not being a distinctive vocalic element, nasalization is handled on a prosodic level, its occurrence at word and syllabic level is discussed. (CLK)

Abbreviated version of this paper was read under the title Nuclear Accent and Intonation Rules of English'' at the 1970 summer meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, in Columbus, Ohio, and an interim version appeared in UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics'' (1971). (VM)

Details a study that explored whether a visual syllable duration pattern affected comprehension and whether the fluency effect could be obtained when accuracy of word pronunciation and rate of reading were used as criteria for fluency. (HOD)

Discusses grammatical morpheme omissions in the phrase productions of children with language impairments. Clinical procedures are described whereby the salience of grammatical morpheme models is increased and the difficulty of production of grammatical morphemes is controlled via manipulation of prosodic contexts to enhance learning of grammatical…

Grosjean and Gee's prosodic structure theory is applied to second-language listening comprehension. It is argued that second-language students whose native language is syllable-timed do not have a mechanism to deal with unstressed syllables and must create one. The absences of this mechanism helps explain difficulties in listening comprehension.…

Compared disyllabic sequences from infants and adults according to their use of frequency, intensity, and duration to mark stress. Concluded that infants in English language environments produce adult-like stress patterns before they produce lexical items, which specify stress. Acoustic and perceptual analyses indicated infants use three acoustic…

Both Italian and English have four degrees of stress: emphatic, main, secondary and weak. This paper outlines some similarities, then reviews differences between the languages that can cause difficulties in learning the second language. (CHK)