AD+-++ATOYE

My bibliografy is about Non-Native Perception and Interpretation of English Intonation.

1) ATOYE points some problems that learners face related to intonation: * Supra-segmental features, of which intonation is a major component, are generally more elusive than the segmental and are therefore more inherently difficult to learn for foreign learners.  * Intonation also remains the most neglected in second language acquisition research in general, for, as observed by Cruz Ferreira (1989: 24), it has only recently begun to be “seriously and systematically taken into account both in the literature devoted to foreign language learning and in teaching itself”  *One of the sources of the difficulty of English intonation for the foreign learner is, no doubt, the undue emphasis placed, in teaching, on its structural analysis rather than on its communicative value in EL2 programmes.

2) Intonation and meaning The author affirms that "Actually, we often react more violently to the intonational meanings than to the lexical ones; if a man’s tone of voice belies his words, we immediately assume that the intonation more faithfully reflects his true linguistic intentions."

For him, the main problems with intonation and meaning are: the tradition in which it is assumed that a one-to-one correspondence exists between intonation contours and the grammatical functions of utterances; in auditory terms, the difference between one tone and another, even amongst well-established specialists on the subject, as tones that are analysed as different are, in many cases, not practically identifiable as such by other phoneticians; the last one is that the same meanings should be ascribed to particular intonation contours in native-speaker English as in non-native speaker English.

On this research, ATOYE also presents an experiment with a group of non native speakers. He selected a few sentences, played them twice and asked the group to indicate whether they perceived any difference between the intonation contours of the two sentences. The conclusion was that people who participated in this research were aware of intonation as part of the linguistic data.