This paper reports two studies of young English-speaking children's ability to cope with changes to the metrical stress pattern of spoken words and the relationship between this ability, phonological awareness and early reading development. Initially, 39 children aged 4 and 5 years were assessed on their ability to identify mispronounced words,…

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…

This article discusses the relationship between intonation and enunciation. The premise is that intonation performs in dependent sentences what allocution and modality perform in independent sentences. (Text is in French.) (AM)

The evidence on the acquisition of intonation by children is reviewed. Reports on the early use of pitch contours fall into two categories, imitational and differential intonation. While imitational intonation is based on mimicry of adults, differential intonation involves the acquisition of two or three tunes that contrast in meaning from an…

The research described here confirmed the hypothesis that for each variable, the Hispanic variant is realized in higher percentages in syllable-timed utterances and that the non-Hispanic variant is realized in higher percentages in stress-timed utterances. (Author/RM)

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Because of neo-acute stress--or transferred acute stress--long vowel prosody in West Slavic had a special evolution. Two kinds of long vowel evolution are examined. The nature of transitionality across Slavic territory from tonal opposition to distinctive stress placement is pointed out. (SC)

The present study is a pilot phonemic analysis which attempts primarily to establish an inventory of phonemic contrasts in Bemba. Also referred to as Chibemba, the term Bemba is used to cover several regional variants of the language. (The variant examined in this study is known as "Central Bemba," spoken in the Kasama District and contiguous…

The behavior of the "It's...who..." type of construction and its relation to defining and non-defining relative clauses is examined. Reference is made particularly to suprasegmental features. Parallels are drawn to French relative constructions. (SCC)

Considers the effects of the loss of the plural morpheme 's' in the Spanish dialect known as oriental Andalusian. The openness of the final vowels is now considered the plural marker but this seems to be only a transitory replacement for the missing plural. (Text is in Spanish.) (TL)

Discusses the esthetic ideas of Henri Bergson with particular emphasis on his thoughts about "intuition" in art and the importance of the prosodic features of literary style. The prosodic quality parallels or reproduces the rhythm of the thoughts being expressed. (Text is in Spanish.) (TL)

Presents an analysis of Spanish stress based on natural generative theory that places strong constraints on phonological abstractness. This analysis takes Spanish stress to be morphologically determined in relation to the stem of the word. (Author/RM)

Discusses the accentuation of two types of sentence in English: (1) straightforward intransitive sentences, and (2) intransitive sentences embedded in the frame "It's just NP noun phrase[ V verb[-ing." Modifications to Gussenhoven's (1983) Sentence Accent Assignment Rule (SAAR) are suggested based on large groups of exceptions of the SAAR.…

Contrastive stress production patterns of 20 moderately to severely hearing-impaired children, aged four to 18, were compared with those of 20 normal-hearing children, aged three to six. Analyses of judges' responses to the speakers' audiotapes recorded during a conversation-based task yielded evidence of similar production patterns for the groups…