1. Broselow, Hurtig, and Ringen (1987) also investigated how intonation is perceived by second language learners. They presented two types of evidence that transfer plays a role in the perception of Chinese tone by English speakers. Specifically, they showed that (1) the L2 learner perceives or "tunes into" familiar pitch patterns automatically, but only when these patterns occur in the same position as in L1, and (2) English speakers perceive second language strings in terms of their native language phonological system but do not attend to parts of the string they consider non-meaningful.
  2. The URL for Kay Elemetrics is: www.kayelemetrics.com. In conjunction with Speech Technology Research (STR) of Victoria, B.C., Canada, the upgraded, next-generation system to Visi-Pitch developed by Kay Elemetrics is CSL (Computer Speech Lab). A subset of the more sophisticated CSL is Visi-Pitch II, designed more as a speech/voice therapy tool.
  3. There are a number of speech analysis systems, many used primarily for acoustic phonetic research with potential for pedagogical application. For DOS- and Windows-based machines, try CSRE (Canadian Speech Research Environment) developed in Western Ontario (URL: www.icis.on.ca/homepages/avaaz/); CSpeech, developed at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (contact Paul Milenkovic: milenkovic@engr.wisc.edu); or WinSAL-V SPEECHLAB, a two-part program developed in Trier, Germany (URL: www.media-enterprise.de/winsal/). SPEECHLAB is an acoustic phonetics analysis package; WinSAL, Speech Analysis under Windows, is a multimedia, interactive program that teaches elementary phonetics, though not intonation per se.

    Another speech analysis system that has been used for both pedagogical and research purposes is the Micro Speech Lab (MSL) developed by the Centre for Speech Technology Research in cooperation with the Department of Linguistics at the University of Victoria, B.C., Canada, reported on in Esling (1992). Various components of the program allow for speech editing (MSLEDIT), manipulatory exercises (MSLSORT), pitch display, and other acoustics, for example, spectrographic information (MSLPITCH and MSLSPECT).

    For the Macintosh computer, any sound digitizer (e.g., MacRecorder, Digidesign's Audiomedia board, or the internal digitizer on most PowerMacintosh computers sold today) can be used in conjunction with a program called Signalyze (cf. Keller, 1988), for example, to produce and store intonation curves of native speakers and learners, as well as to display them next to each other (cf. Chun, 1991). A program called SpeechLab Authoring Tool, based on Signalyze, has been developed to automatically display first the native speaker's utterance and then the student's attempt (cf. Fidelman & Keller, 1994). The purported benefits are that students would get immediate visual and audio feedback of the otherwise elusive dimension of pitch. However, the tool is limited in its pitch-tracking ability and, as with the earlier software for PCs and Windows-based computers, in not providing pedagogical analysis or feedback.

    For Apple II computers, the Video Voice Speech Training System, which uses a graphic display of the human voice, is available from Micro Video Corporation, 210 Collingwood, Suite 100, P.O. Box 7357, Ann Arbor, MI 48107; (313) 996-0262 (URL: www.videovoice.com).

    For UNIX environments, try the Speech Filing System developed at University College London (contact Mark Huckvale: SFS@phonetics.ucl.ac.uk), or ESPS/Waves+ (Entropic Signal Processing System) by Entropic Research Laboratory (URL: www.entropic.com).

  4. The remaining figures were generated by the program MacCECIL (Computerized Extraction of Components of Intonation in Language), developed by SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics). There is also a Windows version WinCECIL. The program is very easy to use and generates very good pitch contours even for data signals that are not of the highest quality. SIL has recently published on its LinguaLinks 2.0 CD-ROM another set of acoustic phonetic tools, among which is the Acoustic Speech Analysis Package (ASAP) 1.0, the successor to WinCECIL (SIL's URL: www.sil.org/).

    I am very grateful to the Summer Institute of Linguistics and to Arnd Strube for making the MacCECIL software available and for generous technical support as well.