This paper creates a novel link between research on linguistics and education by discussing what we know about the sound system of heritage language users of Spanish and how these findings can inform practices implemented in heritage Spanish courses in the USA. First, we provide an overview of terminology associated with heritage language…

Fikkert (1994) analyzed a large corpus of Dutch children's early language production, and found that they often add targetless syllables to their words in order to create bisyllabic feet. In this note we point out a methodological problem with that analysis: in an important number of cases, epenthetic vowels occur at places where grammatical…

Analysis of the quantitative metrical verse of French Renaissance poet Jean-Antoine de Baif finds that the metrics, often seen as unscannable and using an incomprehensible phonetic orthography, derive largely from a system that is accentual, with the orthography permitting the poet to encode quantitative distinctions that coincide with the meter.…

Certain apparently deviant, inverted forms of the French imperative (e.g. "pas touche!" for "ne touche pas!") are analyzed. A number of phonosyntactic explanations that focus on phonological order, rhythm, and intonation are examined. The strength of the imperative intention is also considered. (MSE)

A discussion of English-speaking children's use of subjectless sentences contrasts the competence and performance explanations for the phenomenon. In particular, it reviews evidence indicating that the phenomenon does not reflect linguistic competence, but rather performance constraints. A tentative model of children's production is presented…

A three-tiered statistical model for predicting the temporal structure of French, as produced by a single, highly fluent subject at a fast speech rate, is outlined. The first tier models segmental influences due to phoneme type and contextual interactions between phoneme types. The second tier models syllable-level influences of lexical versus…

An analysis of stress patterns in Old English poetry addresses conflicting theories of and lack of uniformity in scansion and proposes that this problem is due primarily to scansion of a given half-line by somewhat arbitrary assignment to one of five types, with no rule-governed word stress principles upon which to base its scansion. It is…

A discussion of the use of songs to teach French as a second language focuses on the value of songs in teaching aspects of pronunciation. An introductory section describes the benefits of songs as instructional material, particularly to impart cultural information about Quebec to Canadian anglophones. Three sections outline justifications for the…

A case study analyzed the echolalia behavior of an autistic 11-year-old boy, based on recordings made in his home and school. Focus was on the subset of immediate echolalia referred to as pure echoing. Using an approach informed by conversation analysis and descriptive phonetics, distinctions are drawn between different forms of pure echo. It is…