We investigated how Central Swedish-speaking four to eleven-year-old children acquire the prosodic marking of narrow focus, compared to adult controls. Three measurements were analysed: placement of the prominence-marking high tone (prominence H), pitch range effects of the prominence H, and word duration. Subject-verb-object sentences were…

One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…

A primary function of prosody in many languages is to convey information structure--the "packaging" of a sentence's content into categories such as "focus", "given" and "topic". In English and other West Germanic languages it is widely assumed that focus is signaled prosodically by the location of a…

My dissertation undertakes a complete study of the stress patterns, syntactic construction, and rhetorical style of hypermetric verse in Germanic alliterative poetry. This project allows me to fill a gap in the study of Germanic meter while simultaneously investigating the connection between metrical and literary scholarship. Hypermetric meter…

Infants heard sentences in which prosodic structure was either consistent or inconsistent with the syntactic structure. Results suggest that the prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic structure and that learners must engage in active inferential processes to arrive at the correct syntactic…

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.…

The following three levels of intonation are described, and their relationship is discussed: 1) a concrete and atomistic level of the perceptually relevant pitch movements, 2) a concrete and global level of the audible pitch contours and the measurable fundamental frequency curves, and 3) an abstract and global level of intonation patterns.…

Discusses rules governing the intonation of French phrases and sentences. (Text is in French.) (RM)

Questions the thesis that the emphatic English "do" can only be analyzed in terms of discourse context, as opposed to sentence structure. (Text is in French.) (AM)

A study of the relationship between intonation and syntax must consider communication as a whole, rather than isolated sentences. This study examines the role of the speakers in communication, bilateral and unilateral communication, and some pedagogical implications of this study. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Presents a method for the systematic teaching of prosodic features, particularly in French, based on a general theory of intonation and on the use of a pitch visualizer. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Although intonation has been said to be one of the first meaningful units of language that a child acquires, it is difficult to say just what this really means. How does the child learn to distinguish the various grammatical meanings that an intonation can have? It was hypothesized that the child first acquires question and request forms on the…

A descriptive introduction to the Vietnamese language is presented. An introductory chapter gives an overview of the population using Vietnamese, its affiliation with Chinese and other languages, dialects, role in religion, history, writing systems, syllabic structure, and body language. Chapter 2 describes its sound system, syllable boundaries,…

Following a review of related work on intonation, both phonetic and phonemic descriptions of intonation in Italian are presented. Using recordings of radio broadcasts as data, a system of assigning pitch levels to syllables was devised, based on four pitches. The close relationship between stress placement and pitch level was considered. In order…

This article describes phonological and semantic characteristics associated with the surface structure of some Japanese sentence intonations. The aim of the long-term study is to show the place of intonation in the total system of Japanese grammar. This particular part of the study is limited to the group of intonations which are characterized by…