The paper focuses on the vers libre prosody taking into account the auditory aspect of its oral actualisation. The main hypothesis of the study is that vers libre is constituted with a range of definite stable prosodic features that allow referring it to versification and at the same time to something different from a metered text and prose.…

Spoken English has a stress-alternating rhythm that is not marked in its orthography. In two experiments, the authors evaluated whether stylistic alterations to print that marked stress pulses fostered the rendering of rhythm (experiment 1) and stress (experiment 2) during silent reading. In experiment 1, silent readers rated the helpfulness of…

Describes several experiments which examined the basic claims of metrical phonology. The first two experiments examined the possible influences of stress clash in speech timing. The third and fourth experiments tested Hayes's (1984) analysis rule of quadrisyllabic meter; the fifth experiment included a basic test of the stress clash notion. (SED)

Examines syllable-timed languages (Catalan, Greek, Italian) and stress-timed languages (English, Polish) to show that, in regard to rhythm, both categories behave similarly in several crucial areas. In both language types, the ideal rhythmic pattern involves a separation of stresses and the elimination of clashes. (33 references) (JL)

Human newborns discriminate languages from different rhythmic classes, fail to discriminate languages from the same rhythmic class, and fail to discriminate languages when the utterances are played backwards. Recent evidence showing that cotton-top tamarins discriminate Dutch from Japanese, but not when utterances are played backwards, is…

The casual conversation of six pairs of Japanese and six pairs of American colleges students was analyzed for evidence of two related aspects of conversation management: the linguistic characteristics of utterance units and back-channel strategies. Utterance units are defined as those occurring between identifiable pauses or breaks in tempo.…

Gives a summary of the theoretical approaches to the role of phonetics and phonology in language learning and teaching as developed by the Finnish-English cross-language project at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. Analysis was extended over the chains of connected speech to deal with all the phenomena that give rhythm in speech. (Author/VWL)