Describes an innovative program that systematically exposes second-language learners to the phonetic elements of French, including prosodic features of the language. The first half of the 12 one-hour lessons introduces active listening exercises, delaying oral production until lesson seven. The program's goals and instructional units are included.…

Two tracheoesophageal speakers experienced in use of the tracheostoma valve (TSV) produced speech samples varying with location of contrastive stress, sentence intonation, and use of TSV. Listeners (n=34) found that TSV-use reduced speaker ability to signal suprasegmentals; however, locus of the suprasegmentals, particularly stress placement,…

Discusses the components of paralanguage, that is, kinesics, proxemics, and paraverbal features. Argues that paralanguage plays a crucial role in human interaction and is highly culture-specific. Discusses its implications with respect to second language learning and ways in which it can be included in the second-language classroom. (SED)

Describes a study which examines the relationship between context redundancy and keyword intelligibility in sentences having both high and low redundancy. Word pairs were placed in similar positions in two sets of sentences: sentence pairs that one might find in text, and adages together with sentences that might be spoken. (SED)

Examines the prosodic characteristics of "motherese" in the speech of 24 German mothers. Each subject was recorded while addressing (1) her three- to five-day-old baby, (2) the absent infant, as if present, and (3) the adult interviewer. Several hypotheses regarding short and long term effects of "motherese" are discussed.…

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)

Demonstrates that "contractions and their related uncontracted counterparts may have different derivational histories, different semantic contents and different syntactic functions" and discusses the implications of these findings for the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. Revised version of a paper presented at the…

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)

Reexamines data concerning the effect a mobile vowel, followed by the zero-ending, has on a stem's stress pattern in Contemporary Standard Russian. Suggests a new representation of the stress patterns of stems with the vowel-zero alternation. (PMJ)

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.…

By examining data on historical changes in pitch accent plus data from present-day speech analysis, the article concludes that suprasegmental changes are in progress in both Japanese and English languages. Although English and Japanese use different phonetic resources to implement accentuation, vacillation in their respective suprasegmental…

Examines metrical segmentation strategy in Dutch. The first experiment shows that stress strongly affects Dutch listeners' ability and speed in spotting Dutch monosyllabic words in disyllabic nonwords. The second experiment finds the same stress effect when only the target words are presented without a subsequent syllable triggering segmentation.…

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…

In this study, seven children with specific language impairment (SLI) and speech deficits were matched with same age peers and evaluated for iambic (weak-strong) and trochaic (strong-weak) prosodic speech forms. Findings indicated that children with SLI and speech deficits show less mature segmental and speech motor systems, as well as decreased…