Identifies three types of pausing adn discusses their relevance to language teaching. (FB)

Describes Audio-Lectal Practice, a technique which offers systematic and controlled practice in connected discourse while emphasizing oral discourse features of rhythm, tempo, pausing, and suprasegmental patterns. Students listen to, read along with, and imitate recorded texts concurrently. Such practice facilitates oral fluency in the target…

Reports a study which illustrates that a listener can anticipate the score of the opposing team in sports match results from the variation in the announcer's intonation. Investigates how reliable this prediction is and what linguistic features it involves. Relates these findings to general problems in intonation contour interpretation. (PMJ)

Analyzes the intonation patterns used in the oral presentation of the news. The aim is to use this analysis to make students more aware of the significance of what they are listening to and to teach them how to make use of such intonation patterns themselves. (Text is in French.) (TL)

Presents a framework for prosodic analysis of children with language impairments based on systemic phonology. English prosody and speaker usage is discussed; the role of tone, stress, rhythm, and pause are considered; and speech samples are used to show how utterances are broken down into prosodic units. (Author/CR)

A child with chronic otitis media with effusion solved the problem of reduced and fluctuating auditory input with phonological selection and avoidance strategies that capitalized on prosodic cues. Findings illustrate the need to consider interactions among performance, input, and linguistic constraints to explain individual variation in language…

Using French, English, and Hungarian accents, and from 1 to 4 voices, students in a Hungarian French language class dramatized and presented 32 versions of a Guillaume d'Apollinaire poem. Factors that varied in the presentations included the number of participants, recitation patterns, tone of voice, props, and physical movement. (MSE)

Prosodic reading, or reading with expression, is considered one of the hallmarks of fluent reading. The major purpose of the study was to learn how reading prosody is related to decoding and reading comprehension skills. Suprasegmental features of oral reading were measured in 2nd- and 3rd-grade children (N = 123) and 24 adults. Reading…

Introduction: Stress in Spanish is associated with an orthographic mark that indicates stress, but there are also other clues that point to it. Most words have the same stress (on the penultimate syllable), and closed syllables (syllables ending in a consonant) attract the stress. In this paper we study these clues, and consequently the function…

This paper presents patterns of accentual alignment in two varieties of Spanish spoken in the Basque Country: Lekeitio Spanish (LS), with speakers whose other native language is Lekeitio Basque (LB); and Vitoria Spanish (VS), with monolingual speakers of Spanish from the city of Vitoria. These patterns are compared to those of Madrid Spanish (MS),…

For some 30 years, intelligibility has been recognized as an appropriate goal for pronunciation instruction, yet remarkably little is known about the factors that make a language learner's speech intelligible. Studies have traced correlations between features of nonnative speech and native speakers' intelligibility judgements. They have tended to…

Speech production studies have shown that the phonological form of a word is made up of phonemic segments in stress-timed languages (e.g., Dutch) and of syllables in syllable timed languages (e.g., Chinese). To clarify the functional unit of mora-timed languages, the authors asked native Japanese speakers to perform an implicit priming task (A. S.…

This paper reports two studies of young English-speaking children's ability to cope with changes to the metrical stress pattern of spoken words and the relationship between this ability, phonological awareness and early reading development. Initially, 39 children aged 4 and 5 years were assessed on their ability to identify mispronounced words,…

Prosodic, or expressive, reading is considered to be one of the essential features of the achievement of reading fluency. The purpose of this study was to determine (a) the degree to which the prosody of syntactically complex sentences varied as a function of reading speed and accuracy and (b) the role that reading prosody might play in mediating…

This study investigated the effects of age, hearing loss, and cochlear implantation on mothers' speech to infants and children. We recorded normal-hearing (NH) mothers speaking to their children as they typically would do at home and speaking to an adult experimenter. Nine infants (10-37 months) were hearing-impaired and had used a cochlear…