In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…

Early prosodic development (f[subscript 0] variation) was systematically measured in Mandarin-learning infants at the transition from babbling to producing first words. Spontaneous vocalizations of twenty-four infants aged 0;7 to 1;6 were recorded in 45-minute sessions. The speech production of twenty-four caregivers was also audio-recorded during…

A study of the utterances of young children, aged 7 to 22 months, is described. These utterances, varying in length from one to 17 syllables, contain only suprasegmental information because the verbal content was incomprehensible to hearers who were not acquainted with the child and the situation in which the utterances occured. In the corpus,…

This articles discusses intonation in terms of different kinds of contours and demonstrates the inadequacy of any approach to English intonation which treats contours as sequences of significant pitch levels. (NCR)

This study discusses the nature of rhythm as it may apply to speech and language, reviews some of the literature on the development of rhythm, and presents some thoughts relating these findings to specific examples of children's speech. There is evidence to support the view that one need not look at the exact rhythm of any utterance, but only for…

A detailed, spectrographic analysis of two lectures, given by Diego Rivera and Margaret Mead, which were chosen for their realistic naturalness, permits a graphic presentation and description of the patterns of three types of intonation within the declarative sentence in Spanish and American English. They include a minor continuation (A), major…

MUCH OF LANGUAGE ARTS TEACHING IS BASED ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT WORDS ARE NATURAL UNITS OF LANGUAGE AND THAT PRINTED WORDS HAVE ONE-TO-ONE CORRESPONDENCES WITH WORDS IN SPEECH. THE OUTCOME OF THIS ASSUMPTION IS TO EMPHASIZE THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD'S SIGHT VOCABULARY AND WORD PERCEPTION, ESPECIALLY IN RELATION TO THE TEACHING OF READING.…

This study is concerned with problems in language learners' intonation of English. Ten intonation problems were found in the learner speech of two adult Spanish-speaking males: (1) range of pitch, (2) initial rise, (3) final fall, (4) rise to final stressed syllable, (5) placement of prominence, (6) final rise for questions, (7) total question…

In the first part of this study, we measured the alignment (relative to segmental landmarks) of the low F0 turning points between the accentual fall and the final boundary rise in short Dutch falling-rising questions of the form "Do you live in [place name]?" produced as read speech in a laboratory setting. We found that the alignment of…

One of the most remarkable aspects of the babbling of some babies is that it is produced with intonation contours that sound very much like adult sentence melodies. This study reviews the literature and examines longitudinal data collected from seven children. Some of the non-adult-like syntactic uses made of intonation by children for…

This paper seeks to define the relationship between speech and writing as two separate media within language, and suggests the use of the term translation to describe moving from one medium to another. Such a view acknowledges the independence of speech and writing, the possibility of translation in either direction, the possible untranslatability…

The material in this book is the result of an investigation to determine how to teach English intonation effectively and to find the smallest number of patterns which could be used as a basis for initial drills in the language. The book presents a statement of the structure of the English intonation system in relation to the structural systems of…

The dominant trend in phonetics today--due to a large extent to generative phonology--is to discover the brain mechanisms underlying the observed behavior in speech. Among other things there is interest in attempting to find out how motor programs are stored latently, selected, activated into muscular contractions, controlled, and tailored for…

The properties of one of the structures of politeness in the romance languages, the deference system connected with the use of conditional tenses, are analyzed in this paper. Although only Spanish examples are given, the conclusions also apply to French, Italian and Roumanian. The first part of the paper analyzes politeness in relation to its…