Untrained native English listeners assigned foreign accent scores to sentence and narrative utterances produced by native English speakers and Mandarin-speaking learners of English, rendered unintelligible through low-pass filtering. Because the filtered speech stimuli contained little of what could be considered segmental information, results…

Examination of the effect of second-language experience on the production of second-language vowels found that experienced native-speaking German learners of English did not pronounce similar English vowels more intelligibly than inexperienced learners, but experienced speakers produced a dissimilar English vowel better than inexperienced…

Argues that contour tones in East Asian languages behave as melodic units consisting of a root node [upper] dominating a branching specification. It is also argued that, with upper as the tonal root node, no more than two rising or falling tones will contrast underlying. (49 references) (JL)

Two studies compared phonological characteristics of American and Italian preschool-age children with specific language impairments (SLI) with younger controls matched for mean length of utterance and consonant inventory size. In Italian and English, children with SLI had more difficulty in the use of non-final weak syllables. (Contains…

Included in the phonology are three contrastive lexical tones, a prepause syllable (as part of intonation), nine oral vowels, four nasal vowels, and many consonant clusters which differ in accordance with their distribution in reference to their place in the word: prestress, stressed syllable, and poststress. (SCC)

This article attempts, through a study on the acoustic and the perceptual level of the contrast between two Dutch vocalic phonemes, to present a rigorous methodology for contrastive phonetics to be used by language teachers. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Foreign language instruction, particularly the learning of new vocabulary, could greatly benefit from the structural description of semantic fields. Examples are provided. (Text is in German.) (DS)

Many decisions critical to instruction in the classrom are made prior to the beginning of the school day, and, in some cases, prior to the beginning of the school year. The allocation of time to subject areas, the organization of pupils for instructional purposes, and the determination of the content and emphasis of tasks within subject areas are…

Underwater intelligibility of three standard word lists is evaluated in two experiments. Results indicate that words which are equated for difficulty in normal conditions are likewise equated under water. Phoneme distortion was examined in a multiple choice test which showed fricatives and place of production to be most affected under water. (SC)

The problems of measurement and type-formation are discussed in the light of two approaches toward systems of linguistic objects. First, they are discussed as gestalt systems; second, they are discussed in the light of systems of general type viewed as sets of collections of arbitrary distinctive features. (Author/RM)

The phonological system and morphophonemic rules of the Wichita language are examined. Observations are made regarding union and deletion, delayed release to distinguish /c/ from /t/, palatalization of /t/, and a new feature hierarchy. Also discussed is the psychology of speaking a language in which one speech event frequently has many underlying…

Finnish visual verbs and the corresponding terms in English are examined to reveal similarities and dissimilarities in the two semantic fields on the basis of translation equivalence. The contrastive analysis describes how the vocabularies of two genetically unrelated languages interpret the visual activity of seeing and looking, and what kind of…

Recent studies of folk biology clearly reveal the detailed empirical knowledge of living things which is an important and characteristic element of pre-scientific cultures. This paper attempts a contribution to the study of such systems of knowledge by analyzing the comparable skills of a few American birdwatchers. The process of identification of…

The categorizations which humans make of the concrete world are not arbitrary but highly determined. In taxonomies of concrete objects, there is one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cuts are made. Basic categories are those which carry the most information, possess the highest category cue validity, and are, thus, the most…

In this preliminary report the authors compare a part of the phonological systems of Akuapem, Asante, and Fante--the major dialects of Akan. The comparison reveals the features common to all three dialects as well as the features which distinguish the dialects from one another. The description of the phonological systems of these dialects is…