Too often in teaching English to speakers of other languages, the patterns of intonation, stress, and juncture are neglected; as a result, the student's comprehension and power of expression are reduced. After the basic suprasegmental patterns are taught, the teacher should continue to teach the patterns which are useful in distinguishing meanings…

Contrastive analysis of Spanish and English reveals the importance of giving as much attention to suprasegmentals as to segmentals in the teaching of pronunciation. (CFM)

Investigation of the use of five speech markers in the native and second-language production of French-English bilinguals (N=10) found no quantitative difference in the frequency of occurrence of speech markers between the high (N=5) and low (N=5) fluency speakers, although high-fluency speakers used more progressive than regressive marker types.…

A discourse analysis of videotaped teaching demonstrations by 18 Korean and Chinese teaching assistants reveals these non-native speakers of English lack the mastery of those cues, such as prosody and topicalization, that allow native speaker/listeners to perceive intended relationships among the ideas presented. (DJD)

Studies analyzing children's response time to detect word targets revealed that six-year-olds and younger children generally did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show, providing support for the argument that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an…

Identifies indicators of register or style in selected portions of two lectures presented in American Sign Language, and in the interpretations of each made by two interpreters. The indicators used are speaking rate, pausing, syntax, intonation, and lexical choice. Transcripts of data are included in Appendix. (Author/LMO)

Presents an analysis of some aspects of conversational phonology by examining the general phonetic resources that are used by speakers of Tyneside (a nonstandard variety of English). This phonological analysis of the interaction of turn-completion takes into account pitch, loudness, and tempo, as well as segmental features. (TR)

A conceptual framework for short-term and long-term speech-sound normalization research is presented, and 1-year normalization outcomes for the 54 children described in EC 609 708 are reported. Although certain individual speech variables were significantly associated with normalization, there were no speech, prosody-voice, or risk-factor…

Reports on the perceptual discrimination of segmental and suprasegmental phones by Japanese learners of English. Results reveal that early learners showed better discrimination performance than normal learners and confirmed the usefulness of learning English at an early age. (16 references) (Author/CK)

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "Tag Questions, Transformational Grammar and Pragmatics" (Wolfram Bublitz); "Toward Contrasting Styles" (Karol Janicki); "Some More Remarks on the Pedagogical Uses of Contrastive Studies" (Waldemar Marton); "Stress in Polish--With Some Comparisons to English Stress" (James…

This pronunciation manual for the study of English as a foreign/second language can be used with beginning as well as intermediate or advanced students. The text is organized in three parts or cycles. Part One is an introduction to selected features of pitch and stress and an inventory of the vowels and consonants, with contextual illustrations of…

This paper argues that the origin of the tonal accents in Low German, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian can be explained on the basis of segmental circumstances, that they may be considered as secondary in the historical development of these languages, and that they arise when the redundant tonal transition in centering diphthongs becomes distinctive…

Experiments in language teaching have indicated that, especially in the case of teaching English as a foreign language, no pronunciation of English sounds natural unless the intonation (prosodic features) is fairly acceptable. Even with satisfactory consonants and vowels, a phrase with incorrect melody still sounds foreign. On the other hand, when…

Divides American (Midwestern) sounds into 10 categories, and describes their pronunciation on the basis of Daniel Jones'"English Pronuncing Dictionary." Also describes American peculiarities of intonation, rhythm and nasalization. A list of words differing in pronunciation from British is added. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Demonstrates how nonnative varieties of English are distinct from interlanguages or approximate systems of "established" varieties of English. Two strategies are examined: (1) the generalization of rules found in the established varieties of English and (2) the transfer into English of linguistic features from learners' other languages.…