Students of French learn to pronounce the syllables of the same rhythmic group with the same stress and the same intonation while lengthening slightly only the last syllable uttered. Several techniques designed to help students acquire correct French rhythm patterns are described here. They include: (1) counting aloud, (2) syllable division, (3)…

Investigation of the extent to which recognition of a foreign accent is affected by reducing suprasegmental or segmental information involved the reading of five Dutch sentences by native (N=9) and non-native (N=9) speakers. Results indicated that suprasegmental aspects of speech do play a part in a foreign accent. (CB)

Examines the role of suprasegmental phonology in speech processing and its implications for reading instruction; also reviews evidence for the hypothesis that prosodic features cue the boundaries of perceptually functional units in spoken sentences, thus assisting the listener in the segmentation of verbal information. (FL)

The language of sportscasting is analyzed in terms of register variation, first by locating the register by successive approximations to a characterization of occasions of use, then by identifying syntactic characteristics: simplification, inversions, heavy modifiers, result expressions, and routines. Sports announcer talk is described as a…

This article presents an outline for a seminar in English intonation for language teachers. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Surveyed 67 English-as-a-Second-Language programs in canada to determine to what extent pronunciation is taught and which resources are most often used. Also sought demographic information about respondents and their ESL programs, classes and students, methods of teaching, and participants' attitudes. resources preferred by respondents are…

Untrained native English listeners assigned foreign accent scores to sentence and narrative utterances produced by native English speakers and Mandarin-speaking learners of English, rendered unintelligible through low-pass filtering. Because the filtered speech stimuli contained little of what could be considered segmental information, results…

This study investigated the use of beat gestures (typically the sharp up-and-down movement of the hand) in conjunction with L2 speech production. The L2 participant, although in conversation with another person, synchronized his beats with the parsing of his words into syllables. Based on Gal' perin's formulation for the process of…

This paper exposes how function words and their prosodic features play a part in learning and teaching to read in the early years. It sketches the place that function words have in the grammar of English and describes their phonological features, especially their weak stress and its role in the prosodic quality of sentences. It considers the ways…

This article explains the elements of reading fluency and ways to assess and teach them. Fluent reading has three elements: accurate reading of connected text, at a conversational rate with appropriate prosody. Word reading accuracy refers to the ability to recognize or decode words correctly. Reading rate refers to both word-level automaticity…

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Halle & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical…

Shriberg "et al." [Shriberg, L. "et al." (2001). "Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 44," 1097-1115] described prosody-voice features of 30 high functioning speakers with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to age-matched control speakers. The present study reports additional information on the speakers with ASD, including…

In two eye-tracking experiments the role of contrastive pitch accents during the on-line determination of referents was examined. In both experiments, German listeners looked earlier at the picture of a referent belonging to a contrast pair ("red scissors," given "purple scissors") when instructions to click on it carried a…

This study explores the question of whether native and nonnative listeners, some familiar with the language and some not, differ in their accent ratings of native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs). Although a few studies have employed native and nonnative judges to evaluate native and nonnative speech, the present study is perhaps the…

A study describing Finnish phonetics and analyzing prosodic properties is reported. Subjects were two female 17-year-olds, speakers of standard Finnish and well acquainted with each other. Data were drawn from two sources: a conversation between the two, in which one described a picture so the other could draw it, and one a set of stories narrated…