A primary objective of this book is to assist such students in developing whatever level of skill they aspire to in the use of speech form. It would be naive to suppose that good speech can somehow come about without effort or that it can be achieved simply through vocal drill and exercise, necessary as these may be in an incidental way.

It is a generally recognized fact that the English language presents far greater difficulties with regard to its pronunciation than any other European language. This does not mean that foreigners find it partic' ularly hard to acquire a correct pronunciation ofthe various speech sounds of which English is made up. From this point of view English is not any harder to learn than many other languages.

The present research sets out to give a melodic description of British English intonation which is so explicit that it can be used for the control of pitch in a speech synthesis system. Intonation is studied in accordance with the principles that have been followed with success in the study of Dutch intonation at the Institute for Perception Research. The description is based on a mixture of acoustic and perceptual analysis of speech samples and, using speech resynthesis as a research tool, any claims made are experimentally verified.

A manual on English pronunciation, its text is organized in three parts. Part one is an introduction of selected features of pitch and stress and an inventory of the vowels and consonants. Part two presents some of the patterns commonly associated with combinations of features of intonation, vowels, and consonants. The final part offers assorted exercises.

Written by two educators with vast experience in teaching phonology to beginning students, this text is designed for both classroom and independent use.