A study investigated the order of acquisition of inflectional morphology in English within morphemes, focusing on late acquisition of one allomorph of the plural. It is proposed that late acquisition is rooted in the operation of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), which states that at the melodic level, adjacent identical elements are…

Both Italian and English have four degrees of stress: emphatic, main, secondary and weak. This paper outlines some similarities, then reviews differences between the languages that can cause difficulties in learning the second language. (CHK)

A study of the phonetic changes occurring when a speaker attempts to revise an unclear word for a listener focuses on changes made in the sound segment duration to maximize differences between phonemes. In the study, five-year-olds were asked by adults to revise words differing in voicing of initial and final stop consonants; a control group of…

A recurring question in the study of the specialized English used in various technical disciplines is the degree to which contextual variables--including subject matter--account for the particular distributions of lexicogrammatical features in texts of different disciplines. Two contextual variables related to role relationships in the semiotic…

This article is a critical review of a number of statistical works, over the past 50 years, dedicated to the determination of the relative frequency of phonemes. (Author/RM)

Field research into the Heiltsuk language, part of the Kwakiutlic branch of the Wakashan language family, in British Columbia is reported. Some of the features of Heiltsuk phonetics are discussed. (RM)

A systematic analysis of the distribution of Nancowry phonological and morphological elements at word level is presented. Included is a systematically transcribed vocabulary which is ordered according to the word roots. In the section devoted to word phonology, included topics are syllabic structure, stress placement, vowel length and nasality,…

This paper examines three aspects of phonological interference observable in the speech of Puerto Rican bilinguals: (1) segmentation patterns, (2) accentual patterns, and (3) pitch patterns. Ten representative speakers, including nine students and one faculty member, were selected to read a story in the original Spanish and in English translation.…

Eight graduate students were used as experimenters in this study to assess the effects of experimentally induced experimenter outcome bias with respect to selected suprasegmental phenomena (pitch, stress, and terminal intonation) emitted by the experimenters during the instruction reading phase of a behavioral experiment. Experimenters were led to…

This article presents a description of intonation in English in terms of the relationship between the syntactic surface structure of a given sentence and certain distinctive intonative features.

It is shown that a sentence spoken in a foreign language (here, English), though grammatically and lexically correct, may not evoke the proper reaction, because of incorrect intonation. Teaching texts have neglected this field. Some suggestions are given for avoiding misunderstandings caused by faulty intonation. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Data on the acquisition of lexical tone were collected from 17 Mandarin-speaking children. Among other results, it was found that: (1) tone is acquired relatively quickly; (2) mastery of tones occurs well before mastery of segmentals; and (3) Mandarin high-level and falling tones are acquired before rising and dipping tones. (Author/RM)

Investigation of the communicative functions of pitch direction and range in one-year-olds (N=2) indicated that use of pitch among infants may be related to a period where communicative intentions are clearly defined, but language is not yet available. A higher pitch was observed among infants who made repeated requests for objects as opposed to…

Foreign language teachers must be able to correct pronunciation errors that go beyond the level of the segmental phoneme. Extending a technique used with students, it was found that teachers can deal with a number of problems more efficiently if they separately consider single features or aspects of the continuum. (Author/KM)