A method for teaching French oral reading is presented. Prior to the actual oral reading, the student should: (1) read the text attentively for meaning and in order to decide on the appropriate tone; (2) determine the rhythm appropriate to the text; (3) indicate, by means of arrows, the general intonational curve; (4) indicate the "liaisons" to be…

One of the most remarkable aspects of the babbling of some babies is that it is produced with intonation contours that sound very much like adult sentence melodies. This study reviews the literature and examines longitudinal data collected from seven children. Some of the non-adult-like syntactic uses made of intonation by children for…

Parsing sentences into meaningful phrases and clauses is an essential step in language comprehension, and parsing difficulty is a common reading problem. Prosody (intonation, stress, and rhythm) provides information about phrase and clause boundaries in spoken language that is not available in written language. In an experiment to test whether…

Twenty-four English speakers from various regions of India were tested for the intelligibility of their speech. Recordings of speech in a variety of contexts were evaluated by listeners from the United Kingdom, the United States, Nigeria, and Germany. On the basis of the resulting intelligibility scores, factors which tend to hinder…

This discussion begins with a brief description of three approaches to teaching standard Spanish as a second dialect (S.S.S.D.), called the "eradication" approach, the "second dialect" approach, and the "both dialects" approach, which is favored here. Because the teacher of standard Spanish as a second dialect is…

This monograph investigates aspects of language processing that are not specialized in the left hemisphere, and claims that there are "levels" (such as pitch functions) and "subsets" (such as phrase structuring) which are different in essential ways from each other, and from the aspects of speech and language which are typically lateralized.…

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…

When second, fourth, and sixth grade students were asked "What's this?" questions (differing in intonation and stress) and guessed whether there were new or different objects pictured on cards, results indicated that use of intonation was recognized as a marker for topic collaboration by grade four. (Author/CB)

This book describes the phonological and grammatical structure of the whole-Dravidian language family from different aspects, examining its history and writing system, structure and typology, lexicon, and recent contacts between Dravidian and other language groups. The 11 chapters highlight the following: (1) "Introduction" (e.g., the…

Discusses the importance of all forms of nonverbal communication in the teaching of foreign languages, including body language, paralinguistics, cross cultural understanding, and visual aids in teaching. (AM)

Describes the University of Delaware's drama-based approach to enhancing the intelligibility of international teaching assistants (ITA). This training addresses the segmental and suprasegmental features of ITA pronunciation within the context of cultural, pedagogical, and linguistic factors unique to the university classroom environment, and…

Describes the results of using field-specific written materials in a language laboratory setting to teach oral skills in a support course for international teaching assistants for the purpose of promoting automaticity in oral production and raising the intelligibility of students through the improvement of fluency and pronunciation. (25…

The collection of essays on phonetics and phonology, entirely in French, includes: "Le calcul de la frequence intrinseque. Necessite du rapport a une ligne de reference" (calculation of intrinsic frequency; necessity of a line of reference) (Conrad Ouellon); "Caracteristiques microprosodiques de duree et d'intensite en lecture et en…

A descriptive study of Ngaanyatjarra, an Australian Aboriginal language, examines two major areas of sentence structure. First, it describes the grammatical structure of the sentence, beginning with the simplest sentence and moving into verb clusters, complex sentences, and juncture strategies. Second, it outlines the meaning and usage of various…

A discussion of points raised by Dell Hymes in his article "On Communicative Competence" leads to a proposal for a clearer and more comprehensive theory of communicative competence based on two models, a matrix of discourse analysis and a model of communication interaction. Pedagogical implications of the theory are considered, including the…