This updated and expanded version of a 1991 book provides an account of the development of Spanish over the last 2,000 years. The six chapters include: (1) "Introduction" (e.g., Indo-European, Latin, and Romance); (2) "Phonology" (phonological change, transmission, suprasegmental features, development of the vowel system, development of the…

Discusses semiotics, which, in dealing with how meaning is communicated, views language as only one component of communication activity. Gives special attention to the new perspectives which semiotics has given to the study and teaching of intonation. (FB)

Voice quality settings (physiological configurations contributing to phonetic production) can be used to characterize ESL students' accents and help improve pronunciation. Settings of one variety of North American English and those in other languages are identified. Suggestions are given for making students aware of their own settings. (MSE)

This study provides a clinical profile of 178 children (ages 3-6) with developmental phonological disorders, based on prior reports and new data on 64 children. Data discussed include gender, age, and severity; speech profiles; prosody-voice profiles; causal-correlates profiles; and a prevalence profile. (Author/JDD)

Reviews research on the acquisition of suprasegmentals by second language learners and the potential of computer-based instructional materials for improving intonation; describes and critiques some of the software previously available for this purpose; and suggests criteria for the conceptualization of multimedia software and concomitant research…

This paper investigates the acquisition of compound vs. phrasal stress ("hot dog" vs. "hot dog") in English. This has previously been shown to be acquired quite late, in contrast to recent research showing that infants both perceive and prefer rhythmic patterns in their own language. Subjects (40 children in four groups the averages ages of which…

This paper addresses teachers and researchers of English as a second or foreign language who are interested in speech intelligibility training and/or vocabulary acquisition. The study reports a stress-pattern analysis of the Academic Word List (AWL) as made available by Coxhead [TESOL Quarterly 34 (2000) 213]. To examine the AWL in a new way, we…

Background: Many individuals with autism spectrum disorders present with unusual or odd-sounding prosody. Despite this widely noted observation, prosodic ability in autism spectrum disorders is often perceived as an under-researched area. Aims: This review seeks to establish whether there is a prosodic disorder in autism, what generalizations can…

A series of experiments investigated infants' perception of inherent structural organization in the prosody of utterances. The experiments used a listening preference procedure to test: perceptions of appropriate pauses in child-directed and adult-directed speech; perceptions of appropriate pauses in speech filtered for most segmental features but…

A study investigated the hypothesis that children learning Spanish as a first language learn rules for assigning stress, as opposed to simply memorizing stress for individual words. The subjects were 50 Spanish-speaking preschool children. In one portion of the experiment, they imitated sets of 2, 3, or 4 Spanish nonsense words that were…

An important feature of the sentence in any language is its thematic structure, new/given information organization. It has been found that in English, where word order is grammatically determined, the thematic structure is signalled by the place of the sentence stress. If an indefinite noun (new information) is present in the sentence, it bears…

This paper describes a "neglected" aspect of Hawaiian ("Pidgin") English--the suprasegmental or prosodic features. Illustrated by contrastive samples of Hawaiian American English (HAE) and General American English (GAE), the salient prosodic features are presented as follows--(1) syllable-timed rhythm, modified by emphatic…

This article describes phonological and semantic characteristics associated with the surface structure of some Japanese sentence intonations. The aim of the long-term study is to show the place of intonation in the total system of Japanese grammar. This particular part of the study is limited to the group of intonations which are characterized by…

This paper focuses on linguistic prosodic units related to boundaries between syntactic units. Specifically, rules for predicting the location of such boundaries, and factors affecting their location, are discussed. Examples are given on how prosodies can be used for syntactic analysis. Addressing the question of prosodic units and their…

This paper deals with methods and models appropriate to the systematic linguistic study of the child's acquisiton of phonology. Sections I through IV present a review of previous studies in the field, discuss the usefulness of the concept of "innateness," discriminate between phonetic and phonological ability, and discuss the concept of discrete…