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)

A systematic analysis of the distribution of Nancowry phonological and morphological elements at word level is presented. Included is a systematically transcribed vocabulary which is ordered according to the word roots. In the section devoted to word phonology, included topics are syllabic structure, stress placement, vowel length and nasality,…

The results of three experiments investigating where native speakers have a morpheme boundary between stems and word-final English derivational suffixes are reported. The way speakers organize phonological data is demonstrated. The results challenge the generative phonological hypothesis of maximal generalization and assumptions concerning…

The transformation that language undergoes when it becomes speech is examined in English. Statistical analysis of a representative sample of natural, informal speech reveals a number of characteristics of dynamic speech that distinguish it from static (citation form or pre-dynamic) linguistic form. It appears that in running speech, vowels and…

A study of the utterances of young children, aged 7 to 22 months, is described. These utterances, varying in length from one to 17 syllables, contain only suprasegmental information because the verbal content was incomprehensible to hearers who were not acquainted with the child and the situation in which the utterances occured. In the corpus,…

Under the assumption that, with the exception of certain learned, retarded, and borrowed words, the bulk of any language undergoes sound changes that are regular over any given geographical area, over any given time span, and in any given sound environment, these sound changes have been reduced to logical terms and have been programmed to generate…

This articles discusses intonation in terms of different kinds of contours and demonstrates the inadequacy of any approach to English intonation which treats contours as sequences of significant pitch levels. (NCR)

Outlines the stages of prosodic development that children follow from the beginning of word acquisition through the end of the second year of life. How these stages can be used to provide a model for treatment when working with children who display delayed phonological development is addressed. (Author/CR)

Describes English-speaking children's acquisition of voice onset time. The study evaluated two hypotheses, one predicting that children would control the vowel duration contrast earlier than the consonantal one and one predicting that they would control the contrast represented on the segmental level of linguistic description earlier than the…

Seventeen native English speakers participated in an investigation of language users' knowledge of English main stress patterns. First, they produced 40 two-syllable nonwords of varying syllabic structure as nouns and verbs. Second, they indicated their preference for first or second syllable stress of the same words in a perception task. Finally,…

A structural analysis provides new evidence concerning the internal structure of the syllable in Wolof, a West African language, through examination of the secret code called Kall, spoken mainly in Senegal's Ceneba area. It is proposed that Kall is better described as involving primarily a reduplication of the prosodic word. The first section…

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,…

Students of French learn to pronounce the syllables of the same rhythmic group with the same stress and the same intonation while lengthening slightly only the last syllable uttered. Several techniques designed to help students acquire correct French rhythm patterns are described here. They include: (1) counting aloud, (2) syllable division, (3)…

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)