Well-documented Romance-Germanic differences in the use of accent in speech to convey information-structure and focus cause problems for the assessment of prosodic skills in populations with clinical disorders. The strategies for assessing the ability to use lexical and contrastive accent in English and Spanish are reviewed, and studies in the…

One of a regular series on the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications, this report covers the period of January 1-June 30, 1984. The 14 studies summarized in the report deal with the following topics: (1) sources of variability in early speech development, (2)…