Certain apparently deviant, inverted forms of the French imperative (e.g. "pas touche!" for "ne touche pas!") are analyzed. A number of phonosyntactic explanations that focus on phonological order, rhythm, and intonation are examined. The strength of the imperative intention is also considered. (MSE)

In a study of interspecies understanding, 75 naive human listeners classified 18 vocalizations of monkeys into 1 of 7 semantic categories, which were also related to the behavioral situation. Results suggest that both species share vocalization patterns signalling fear, aggression, dominance, and emotional neutrality. (45 references) (LB)

Some of the articulatory, theoretical, instrumental, and psycholinguistic evidence concerning the validity of the notion of ambisyllabicity in English is examined. Applications of the concept, including the notion of syllables being "half-closed" by ambisyllabic consonants, are considered. A set of rules is presented. (76 references) (Author/LB)

Discusses the use of imagination as a tool to improve students' musicianship. Suggests that imagery can be used to teach intonation, tone color, sight-reading, and expression. Describes active listening in which the students must use musical memory and participate in musical expression to produce a certain sound that may be difficult to describe.…

In two experiments, five phoneticians rated the dissimilarity of two pitch contours to investigate whether important audible differences would correspond with visually conspicuous differences between displayed pitch contours. Results indicate that visual feedback may be very effective in intonation training if auditorily relevant features of pitch…

This study investigated the effectiveness of four different methods for measuring the similarity of pitch contours. The correlation coefficient between two normalized contours was the best method; however, if pitch range is important, the mean distance and the root-mean-square distance should be considered first in automatic training in…

Describes how to use intonation and dialog context to improve the performance of an automatic speech-recognition system. Experiments utilized the DCIEM Maptask corpus, using a separate bigram language model for each type of move and showing that, with the correct move-specific language model for each utterance in the test set, the recognizer's…

Reviews current intonational research that is relevant to teaching and presents implications for pedagogy. Argues there are two primary reasons for a lack of innovation in intonation teaching materials: 1) Current materials are based on an inadequate view of the functions of intonation; 2) materials lack a communicative purpose. (Author/VWL)

Presents an approach to teaching pronunciation to Chinese students of English that has been successful in improving students' pronunciation and intonation, as well as their basic skills in English. The approach compares Chinese and English sound systems, advocates perception before production, and emphasizes teaching in a meaningful and…

Discusses the use of focus, or intonational prominence, to create meaning for learners of English. Presents an alternative approach to predicting focus that appeals to functional and meaning regularities that do not depend on extensive written input and are more easily adaptable to normal conversation. (Author/VWL)

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of sight-singing instruction using specific pitch skills emphasizing scale degree and harmonic function. Fifteen pitch skills encompassing scalar, cadential, and chordal tasks were included in the study. Over a 12-week period, two randomly assigned groups of novice high school singers…

In the context of classroom communication, there is a premium on the clarity of the message, and instructors will typically employ multiple linguistic cues to highlight information structure. Using a model of intonation in discourse [Brazil, D. (1986). "The communicative value of intonation in English." Birmingham, England: University of…

In Mandarin Chinese, word meaning is partially determined by lexical tone (Wang, 1973). Previous studies suggest that lexical tone is processed as linguistic information and not as pure tonal information (Gandour, 1998; Van Lanker & Fromkin, 1973). The current study explored the online processing of lexical tones. Event-related potentials were…

The present study investigated 3-year-old children's perception and production of Mandarin lexical tones in monosyllabic words. Thirteen 3-year-old, Mandarin-speaking children participated in the study. Tone perception was examined by a picture-pointing task, and tone production was investigated by picture naming. To compare children's productions…

A large percentage of patients who have undergone laryngectomy to treat advanced laryngeal cancer rely on an electrolarynx (EL) to communicate verbally. Although serviceable, EL speech is plagued by shortcomings in both sound quality and intelligibility. This study sought to better quantify the relative contributions of previously identified…