The starting-point of this study is the hypothesis (suggested by an overview of typologically varied languages) that it may be useful to characterise prosodic systems in terms of the degree to which they rely on the calculation of tone sequences. Each language could be placed at a certain position along a typological continuum between two types of prosodic organisation: (i) ‘calculated prosody’...

The present study examines the relative impact of segments and intonation on accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility, specifically investigating the separate contribution of segmental and intonational information to perceived foreign accent in Korean-accented English. Two English speakers and two Korean speakers recorded 40 English sentences. The sentences were manipulated by combi...

Recently the studies concentrating on computer assistant language learning (CALL) has been growing in numbers as they offer many advantages that couldn't otherwise be provided by a traditional classroom setting. In addition to popular computer-assisted pronunciation teaching (CAPT) systems, computer-assisted prosody training system is another branch of CALL (Computer assistant language learning...

The standard way to represent language within linguistics is using letter-like units, i.e., with consonant and vowel phones and phonemes. But this representation, despite its powerful intuitive appeal is not supported by any experimental data. There are 4 straightforward predictions implied by this model. All are shown to fail. One of the main problems is the inability of segments to permit rep...