German and French differ in a number of aspects. Regarding the prosody-pragmatics interface, German is said to have a direct focus-to-accent mapping, which is largely absent in French--owing to strong structural constraints. We used a semi-spontaneous dialogue setting to investigate the intonational marking of Verum Focus, a focus on the polarity of an utterance in the two languages (e.g. the c...

This paper investigates the coordination relations between f0 turning points and segmental landmarks in falling pitch accents in Catalan. Ten Central Catalan speakers participated in the production experiment, for a total of 500 target pitch accents. Results indicate that while the beginning of the falling accent gesture (H) is tightly synchronized with the onset of the accented syllable, the e...

Learners frequently experience phonologically inconsistent input, such as exposure to multiple accents. Yet, little is known about the consequences of phonological inconsistency for language learning. The current study examines vocabulary acquisition with different degrees of phonological inconsistency, ranging from no inconsistency (e.g., both talkers call a picture /vig/) to mild but detectab...

The pitch contour of an English declarative question read aloud by 12 Chinese EFL learners is labeled and analyzed by means of the phonetic software “praat” on the basis of the English intonation grammar proposed by Pierrehumbert. The careful study yields to two findings. 1) Most Chinese EFL learners can locate correctly the stresses of the target sentence and attach legal tonal events to the p...

This study addresses the question of whether L1-speakers of Vietnamese – a tone language – and L1-speakers of Somali – a language with tonal accents – differ in degree of accuracy when producing words that carry either of the two tonal accents in L2-Swedish. Some previous studies suggest that it is an advantage when discriminating between different tones in another tone language, if a speaker’s...

The article deals with topical challenging issues that are related to the training of future teachers English language. first which is absence any Standards itself. definitions term ‘Standard’ from Cambridge and Oxford dictionaries given. paper also insists neither European Framework nor language proficiency exams (IELTS та TOEFL) standards for their native speakers this type standardization ex...

Joint Accent Structure (jAS) is a construct that uses temporal relationships between different accents in a melodic pattern as indices of its complexity. Concordant patterns are ones in which the periodic recurrence of melodic accents form simple ratios with the period of temporal accents (e.g., 1:1, 1:2), whereas Discordant patterns have periods of melodic and temporal accents with a more comp...