Reports on the perceptual discrimination of segmental and suprasegmental phones by Japanese learners of English. Results reveal that early learners showed better discrimination performance than normal learners and confirmed the usefulness of learning English at an early age. (16 references) (Author/CK)

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "Tag Questions, Transformational Grammar and Pragmatics" (Wolfram Bublitz); "Toward Contrasting Styles" (Karol Janicki); "Some More Remarks on the Pedagogical Uses of Contrastive Studies" (Waldemar Marton); "Stress in Polish--With Some Comparisons to English Stress" (James…

This pronunciation manual for the study of English as a foreign/second language can be used with beginning as well as intermediate or advanced students. The text is organized in three parts or cycles. Part One is an introduction to selected features of pitch and stress and an inventory of the vowels and consonants, with contextual illustrations of…

This paper argues that the origin of the tonal accents in Low German, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian can be explained on the basis of segmental circumstances, that they may be considered as secondary in the historical development of these languages, and that they arise when the redundant tonal transition in centering diphthongs becomes distinctive…

Experiments in language teaching have indicated that, especially in the case of teaching English as a foreign language, no pronunciation of English sounds natural unless the intonation (prosodic features) is fairly acceptable. Even with satisfactory consonants and vowels, a phrase with incorrect melody still sounds foreign. On the other hand, when…

Divides American (Midwestern) sounds into 10 categories, and describes their pronunciation on the basis of Daniel Jones'"English Pronuncing Dictionary." Also describes American peculiarities of intonation, rhythm and nasalization. A list of words differing in pronunciation from British is added. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Demonstrates how nonnative varieties of English are distinct from interlanguages or approximate systems of "established" varieties of English. Two strategies are examined: (1) the generalization of rules found in the established varieties of English and (2) the transfer into English of linguistic features from learners' other languages.…

This study investigated the relationship of phonological awareness to learning to read. Australian first-grade children were tested for verbal intelligence, phonemic segmentation ability, and reading achievement. Path analysis revealed phonological awareness affected reading comprehension indirectly through phonological recoding. The development…

This study investigated the acquisition of speaking skills in an online distance education course of 19 first semester Spanish learners. The possibility of oral development in a strictly online course was examined based on students' pronunciation production in two types of recorded speaking activities and in two real-time conversations. Students…

In this paper, experiments on the automatic discrimination of basic emotions from spoken Finnish are described. For the purpose of the study, a large emotional speech corpus of Finnish was collected; 14 professional actors acted as speakers, and simulated four primary emotions when reading out a semantically neutral text. More than 40 prosodic…

A study investigated requests as speech acts in "Zulu English," the English of Zulu first-language speakers, seeking to explain miscommunication in interactions between Zulu- and English-speakers by pointing to pragmatic transfer as one possible cause. Data were collected by means of a series of discourse completion tests in Zulu, Zulu…

Papers in this volume include: "The Role of Tone in Some Cushitic Languages" (David L. Appleyard); "Downdrift in a Tone Language with Four Tone Levels" (G. N. Clements); "Non-Pitch Exponents of Accent and Structure in Japanese" (John Coleman); "Clause Structure and Tone in Sandawe" (Edward D. Elderkin);…

This paper reports results of an analysis of pronunciation problems and error patterns in the recorded speech of 38 immigrants to Sweden. The recordings, of both spontaneous and elicited speech in Swedish, were taken from an archival collection. The native-language groups studied include British English, Spanish, Polish, Finnish, Greek, Persian,…

Since 1971 the approach adopted in the teaching of English phonetics in Denmark has been a contrastive one. In this paper it is argued that although the original contrastive hypothesis (Lado 1957) has to be modified and weakened, a contrastive approach is highly useful in learning and teaching the pronunciation of a foreign language. Selected…

The many studies comparing good and poor readers have yielded few conclusive findings as a result of a number of problems. The first set of problems has to do with the choice of tests or tasks. There are many differences in the cognitive demands of reading and listening tasks children encounter in school. In listening, prosodic cues facilitate…