Two studies examined children's perceptual biases in extracting or identifying words from the stream of speech. In one study, evidence for the salience of stressed and final syllables was found. Young children less frequently omitted those syllables from their productions and produced unstressed and nonfinal syllables less accurately. A second…

A study examined the consistency of consonant use in the infant's transition period from babbling to early words. Phonetic data were collected from the speech of 10 infants aged 9 to 15 months. Analysis of consonant distribution patterns indicate striking segmental preferences in all 10 children, with some segments more prominent for the sample as…

Describes a study of the developmental ordering of syllable and phoneme segmentation abilities in preschool, kindergarten and first-grade children. Results indicate that both syllable and phoneme segmentation increased with grade level, but analysis into phonemes is significantly harder and perfected later than analysis into syllables. (Author/SDH)

Paper presented at the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (74th, Miami Beach, Florida, November 1967).

Compiled by elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers, this guide describes activities for developing students' skills in phonics and structural word analysis. For each activity, a purpose or objective is stated, required materials are listed, specific teaching procedures are outlined, and the intended grade level (kindergarten,…

Prosodic characteristics of English, German, Spanish, and French are compared and contrasted in this second of a series of articles on general phonetic characteristics of American English. Major attention is given to declarative intonation, place of logical stress in the word and sense group, nature of logical stress, variations in syllable…

This master's thesis examines the utility of Edward Fry's 23 syllabication generalizations. To validate these rules, two sets of one thousand words each were selected, one set containing "easy" words taken from the Word Frequency Book, the second set containing "hard" words taken randomly from the Thorndike Barnhart Advanced…

The stress patterns of Aragonese are examined within the framework of generative phonology, based on data taken from the traditional works of Haensch, Badia Margarit, and Alvar Lopez. Stress placement is shown to be regular. Two sets of rules which account for the data are compared. In the preferred solution, a penultimate stress rule, a rule of…

Two experiments conducted at the University of Texas at Austin are discussed in this paper. One experiment deals with the production of final syllable lengthening and stress in Spanish and English by native Spanish speakers learning English. The other experiment deals with judgments about the Spanish speakers' production of English by native…

This paper reviews the evidence that Proto-Niger-Congo was a tone language with only two level tones and seeks to find the evidence that will explain how some of the descendant languages have more than two tones. In particular it shows how synchronic tone rules in Cama and consonant correspondences between Cama and Yoruba suggest a new factor in…

This is a preliminary report on the testing of two hypotheses related to the acquisition of Spanish phonemes, namely that in the nasal series, production of the labial is acquired before the dental, followed by the velar; and that the liquid series, containing "l", "r", and trilled "r" (rr) will be the last class of sounds to be acquired. These…

The material in this report represents some of the earliest results of field research in the languages of Nepal by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc. Some of the results presented here are tentative hypotheses, subject to revision in the light of continuing research. Part I, the present volume, presents phonological data in terms of…

This beginning text in Navaho, based on techniques developed by Frank C. Laubach, introduces the symbols for each of the sounds separately and then in words and simple sentences. The illustrations which accompany the symbols serve to reinforce the sound/letter association. See AL 002 251 for the supplementary volume, "Charts and Teaching…

The purpose of this instructional unit is to help secondary school students gain proficiency in phonetic analysis. The format of the unit provides the student with practice, testing, and retesting. It contains controlled vocabulary lists for each area and attempts to establish overlearning and automatic response to several of the high frequency…

This study evaluated the effects of individual differences in attitudes toward sex roles on the learning of neutral material associated with situations differing in rated sex-role appropriateness. It was hypothesized that if sexism is a valid dimension as measured in this study, then "sexists" would learn nonsense syllables associated with scenes…