Although a great many textbooks of general phonetics deal with the articulation and the acoustics of speech sounds, these works generally deal only briefly with the facts of suprasegmental phonetics--rythm, accent, and intonation. The author feels "it is precisely suprasegmental phonetics which is the most important in our French classes because…

This study of child language acquisition concerns various structural and paralinguistic features of language and examines their role in the total language acquisition process. The informants were three children (two boys and one girl) aged five years, two months; three years, four months; and one year, nine months. Their speech was recorded over a…

Three studies were conducted to examine whether printed cues conveying information about spoken intonation patterns would aid beginning readers in synthesizing printed words into spoken sentences. To represent intonation patterns, words were printed in three sizes corresponding to stress-pitch levels, and spacing between phrase boundaries was…

In Cantonese, there are cases where two semantically related monosyllabic morphemes contrast with each other by tone only. Such cases may be classified into four groups. Synchronic classification of examples may be of some pedagogical use to teachers and students of Cantonese. (CHK)

Reports that intonational contrasts in reading "yes-no" list items may both influence the reporting of the items themselves and have indirect outcomes by influencing affective-motivational respondent states. (RL)

Allophonic variations in the quality and voicelessness of British English Received Pronunciation /1/ were investigated, largely through their acoustic correlates as revealed by spectrography. (Author/RM)

Describes an innovative program that systematically exposes second-language learners to the phonetic elements of French, including prosodic features of the language. The first half of the 12 one-hour lessons introduces active listening exercises, delaying oral production until lesson seven. The program's goals and instructional units are included.…

Reports on three experiments that assessed the attentional responses of 4-month-old infants to frequency-modulated sweeps corresponding to the frequency range of adult-to-infant and adult-to-adult intonational patterns. (HOD)

Examines the prosodic characteristics of "motherese" in the speech of 24 German mothers. Each subject was recorded while addressing (1) her three- to five-day-old baby, (2) the absent infant, as if present, and (3) the adult interviewer. Several hypotheses regarding short and long term effects of "motherese" are discussed.…

Grade-school children's selective listening preferences for natural and altered narratives were investigated. (Author)

Revised version of a paper presented at the December 27, 1972 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Atlanta, Georgia; research supported by the National Science Foundation. (DD)