Explores one aspect of the relationship between intonation and punctuation. Outlines the historical development of punctuation, and compares twentieth-century punctuation rules with what is known about the division of connected speech into intonation-groups. Suggests that, where syntactic prescription and intonational usage conflict, a return to…

Examined recorded business telephone conversations, noting that at least some forms of spontaneous conversation contained a second form of global intonational marking. Certain attributes of intonation persisted throughout discourse units in the calls, differentiating one unit from another. Two types of parameters emerged (one controlling midpoint…

This study compared how one typical 8-year old and two 8-year olds with profound deafness conveyed contrastive stress in their speech in simple declarative sentences. For the students with deafness, intensity measurements showed little variation across sentences and no intensity peaks corresponding to the syllables that should be contrastive.…

Three experimental techniques that can be used to investigate the gradient of discrete nature of intonational differences, the semantic task, the imitation task, and the pitch range task are discussed and evaluated. It is pointed out that categorical perception is a sufficient but not a necessary, property of phonological discreteness. (Author/VWL)

Musically tone-deaf individuals have psychophysical deficits in detecting pitch changes, yet their discrimination of intonation contours in speech appears to be normal. One hypothesis for this dissociation is that intonation contours use coarse pitch contrasts which exceed the pitch-change detection thresholds of tone-deaf individuals (Peretz &…

The classic picture of an autistic individual includes an impoverished ability to interpret or express emotion. The prosody of spoken language in autistic children is thought to lack emotional content. In this study, the verbal intonation of children with autism was examined and compared to that of children with Asperger Syndrome (AS) and normal…

The prosodic aspects of hypokinetic dysarthria in Parkinson's disease (PD) have been the focus of numerous reports. Few data on the effects of levodopa on prosody, more specifically on the effects on the variability of prosodic characteristics such as pitch, loudness and speech rate, are available in advanced PD. The relation between these…

Phonological awareness (PA) is the ability to analyze spoken language into its component sounds and to manipulate these smaller units. Literature review related to PA shows that a variety of factor groups play a role in PA in Mandarin such as linguistic experience (spoken language, alphabetic literacy, and second language learning), item type,…

Teachers may resist the notion of teaching as a performance but his or her voice, gestures, and movement in the classroom can help or harm student attentiveness. Strong skills in voice and movement can help illuminate a teacher's questions and ideas for students, drawing attention to what matters, holding their attention through a long class, and…

Evidence that the abilities to repeat nonwords and to learn language are very closely related to one another has led to widespread interest in the cognitive processes underlying nonword repetition. One suggestion is that nonword repetition is a relatively pure measure of phonological short-term memory closely associated with other measures of…

Non-segmental properties functioning in verse are discussed in an attempt to point to the possibility of a semantic analysis of the poem based entirely on accent. (Available from: See FL 508 214.) (Author/RM)

Data was collected from 45-minute conversational interviews of 20 Cubans, who arrived in the United States in 1980, to analyze vocalic processes in Cuban Spanish. Four vocalic processes found in Cuban Spanish (raising and devoicing of unstressed vowels, lengthening of stressed vowels, and diphthongization of stressed mid vowels) were examined.…

A study investigated the intonational patterns used by women and men at the ends of utterances for the purpose of managing discourse. The research sought to describe how intonation helps to signal that a speaker is through speaking and desires a response or reaction from the listener, or that the speaker is not through with a turn and wishes to…

IF AN EFFORT WERE MADE TO HAVE STUDENTS CONTINUALLY HEAR AND PRODUCE THE LANGUAGE BEING STUDIED IN A FAIRLY REALISTIC WAY FROM THE BEGINNING, THEY WOULD BE MORE MOTIVATED TO LEARN AND WOULD MAKE THE TRANSITION FROM THE CLASSROOM TO PRACTICAL SITUATIONS AND MORE ADVANCED STUDY MORE EASILY. THE TRADITIONAL KINDS OF STRUCTURE DRILLS INCORPORATED IN…

CHINESE SPEAKERS IN THE UNITED STATES USUALLY SPEAK CHINESE WITH ENGLISH WORDS INSERTED. IN MANDARIN CHINESE, A TONE-SANDHI RULE CHANGES A THIRD TONE PRECEDING ANOTHER THIRD TONE TO A SECOND TONE. THE THIRD TONE IS LOW--THE THREE OTHER TONES ARE HIGH. IT IS THE (-HIGH) FEATURE THAT PROVOKES CHINESE TONE SANDHI. USING THE TONE-SANDHI RULE, THE…