The aim of the study was to test for possible functional cerebral asymmetry in processing one segment of linguistic prosody, namely word stress, in Croatian. The test material consisted of eight tokens of the word "pas" under a falling accent, varying only in vowel duration between 119 and 185ms, attached to the end of a frame sentence. The…

A central question in psycholinguistic research is how listeners isolate words from connected speech despite the paucity of clear word-boundary cues in the signal. A large body of empirical evidence indicates that word segmentation is promoted by both lexical (knowledge-derived) and sublexical (signal-derived) cues. However, an account of how…

Background: Disordered expressive prosody is a widely reported characteristic of individuals with autism. Despite this, it has received little attention in the literature and the few studies that have addressed it have not described its relationship to other aspects of communication. Aims: To determine the nature and relationship of expressive and…

This article discusses reasons for explicit pronunciation instruction, despite the continued neglect of this area in the communicative classroom. "ACTFL/NCATE Program Standards for the Preparation of Foreign Language Teachers (2002)" and "Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century" (National Standards, 1999) dictate that teachers…

Purpose: Little is known about the phonological aspects of derivational processes. Neutral suffixes (e.g., "-ness") that do not change stress and rhythmic or nonneutral suffixes (e.g., "-ity") that alter stem stress were used in a production task that explored developmental changes in phonological accuracy of derived English…

A study of tone and accent in Qafar, a Cushitic language characterized by tonal rather than stress accent, modifies an earlier claim made about the relationship between accent and gender. The newer study makes a proposal that simplifies the account of gender in that this category is seen as determined rather than determining. This further suggests…

From a survey of over a thousand "diapoints" emerges a clear distributional pattern of nasal vowels in the contemporary dialects of China. They tend to occupy the lower portion of the vowel space. Three hypotheses are proposed to explain this phenomenon and each hypothesis is examined against a broad data base. (Author/TL)

An analysis of high vowel variation in Quebec French shows that the phenomenon can generally be accounted for in terms of stress and syllabic closure. However, it is also proposed that by positing underlying lax high vowels in the language, a more insightful analysis is achieved, suggesting that a process of high vowel tensing is occurring…

The transformation that language undergoes when it becomes speech is examined in English. Statistical analysis of a representative sample of natural, informal speech reveals a number of characteristics of dynamic speech that distinguish it from static (citation form or pre-dynamic) linguistic form. It appears that in running speech, vowels and…

This article presents a model of a proficiency test for objectively evaluating the French pronunciation of advanced English-speaking students. A survey of different techniques is made. The specific techniques described allows for testing of phonemic, phonetic and prosodic competency. A sample correction grid is included. (CLK)

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,…

The tone-changing rules in Central (Standard) Thai are traditionally analyzed as having five contrasting tones--mid, low, high, falling, and rising. (Abramson's graph of the fundamental frequency variations for single vowel Thai syllables illustrates these five tones.) Theoretically, each tone may be part of any Thai syllable. Any Thai syllable…

One characteristic of Japanese pitch accent is that there is the so-called "flat" accent, which has no fall or nucleus. This type of accent exists not only in Standard Japanese but in many dialects, including Kyoto. But the flat types are different in the Tokyo and Kyoto dialects. In the Tokyo dialect, the first syllable always has a low…

Under the assumption that, with the exception of certain learned, retarded, and borrowed words, the bulk of any language undergoes sound changes that are regular over any given geographical area, over any given time span, and in any given sound environment, these sound changes have been reduced to logical terms and have been programmed to generate…

This annotated bibliography, which has been entered into the SOLAR Bibliography File, focuses on the phonetics and phonology of tone, including studies on the physiology of phonation and pitch control, pitch perception, inherent pitch of vowels, the interaction of tone with musical melody in tone languages, and other related issues. An attempt has…