Prosodic, or expressive, reading is considered to be one of the essential features of the achievement of reading fluency. The purpose of this study was to determine (a) the degree to which the prosody of syntactically complex sentences varied as a function of reading speed and accuracy and (b) the role that reading prosody might play in mediating…

This study investigated the effects of age, hearing loss, and cochlear implantation on mothers' speech to infants and children. We recorded normal-hearing (NH) mothers speaking to their children as they typically would do at home and speaking to an adult experimenter. Nine infants (10-37 months) were hearing-impaired and had used a cochlear…

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 relationship between turn-regulation, the phonetic features of pitch, and loudness is examined in a study of two recorded natural conversations in Akan. Analysis of patterns in turn-delimitation suggests that (1) diminuendo loudness, a low pitch height, and falling pitch movement are treated by turn-occupants and their co-participants as…

The phenomenon of the modified register, here termed Foreigner Register, the register of language that is used by language teachers with students of perceived low language proficiency, is discussed. As used by language teachers, Foreigner Register is well formed and simplified or modified in terms of syntax, phonology, and lexis. The…

A unified, coherent pedagogical treatment of stress in all inflected words in Russian is elaborated here, using three notational symbols: the acute, the crossed acute and the wedge. (CHK)

The phonological rule that assigns stress at the word level in Modern French is examined in an effort to show how a consideration of productivity, morphological relatedness, and grammatical conditioning motivates a phonetically determined stress rule for Modern French. (Author/RM)

The following three levels of intonation are described, and their relationship is discussed: 1) a concrete and atomistic level of the perceptually relevant pitch movements, 2) a concrete and global level of the audible pitch contours and the measurable fundamental frequency curves, and 3) an abstract and global level of intonation patterns.…

A case study of a 2-year-old progressing normally in speech development provides evidence of suprasegmental marking of the plural, thought to be adopted only in language-impaired children. Acoustic analyses of the durations and intensity of elicited words indicate that the child had adopted a suprasegmental strategy for marking the singular/plural…

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…

The article accounts for the phenomenon of aspiration in Jaffna Tamil, a dialect distinct form South Indian dialects of Tamil. Not being distinctive orphonologically determined, aspiration is dealt with as a prosodic feature affecting voiceless stops in various positions. Distribution and symbolic representation are handled; kymographic evidence…

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)

Discusses rules governing the intonation of French phrases and sentences. (Text is in French.) (RM)

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…