One of the most distinguished members of our Association has, since our last issue, celebrated his eightieth birthday. Roger Kingdon's earliest connections were with the West Country and London. He was born in the borough of Greenwich and went to the City of London School. His working career began at Plymouth on the Western Morning News in 1908, but by 1912 he had begun at Barcelona his long series of stays abroad. During the first world war he enlisted in the Artists' Riflės and was later commissioned in the Royal Engineers. Between 1920 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War he spent much of his time teaching English in Barcelona. In the session of 1936–37 he was a student at University College, London, Phonetics Department, staying on two further years to teach in the Department.

There are many unsolved problems concerning the linguistic interpretation of intonation curves obtained instrumentally. Among the major ones are (1) How accurate must the instrumental data be to make sure that no linguistically relevant information is missed? (2) Which of the details of the intonation curve are linguistically relevant? (3) How should the graph be scaled? (4) How should the curves be normalized so as to neutralize individual (speaker-dependent) differences?

The dialect of Western Pennsylvania is one of the chief varieties of American English and may be considered a subdialect of the so-called General American speech. The dialect has Pittsburgh for its focal point and extends for a radius of probably no more than 200 miles around that city.

Although Hindi is a major world-language, with well over a hundred million speakers, the description of its prosodic features has been neglected. Like most other present-day Indo-European languages, it is a non-tone language, with sentence intonation and a stress accent. Stress occurs on syllables within words (word-stress) and on words within sentences (sentence-stress). By confining ourselves in the first instance to single-word utterances we may formulate some rules for word-stress, as a preliminary to a discussion of sentence-stress and intonation.

Anglo-Saxon had a word œrs, meaning ‘rump, podex, buttocks,’ which evolved into Early Modern English arse, pronounced approximately [aɹs]. Normally, this evolution would have eventually produced a word spelled arse and pronounced [ɑːs] in Southern British and [ɑɹs] in General American. In Southern British, this development followed its normal course. In Anglophone North America, however, the word developed differently. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a tendency appeared in America to level the combination ar = [aɹ], when followed by a voiceless lingual in certain combinations, with ‘short a’ = [æ]. Hence, for cartridge, hearth, parcel, appeared the pronunciations [ˈkætrιdƷ, hæθ, ].

Speech perception is of interest to linguists and psychologists alike. Psychologists seek for linguistic units to enable them to explain processes involved in speech; linguists try to establish what these units may be, whether distinctive features, phonemes, syllables, words or even larger units. Although the phoneme was for some time considered to be the most likely candidate, experimental evidence is increasingly pointing to some larger unit, particularly in view of the fact that no one-to-one acoustic correlation with the phoneme nor with distinctive features can be found (cf. Reddy, 1967: 336, Ladefoged, 1967: 146, Denes, 1963: 892). Furthermore, if the phoneme were to be the unit of perception, in any sort of processing involving matching a perceived pattern with one already stored, far too many operations would be involved because of the large size of vocabularies and large number of sentence types in a language; such processing would have to be too rapid to be feasible, bearing in mind the constraints of memory span. There is now more sympathy for the syllable or larger stretch as the unit of perception (e.g. Laver, 1970: 68, Maclay and Osgood, 1959, Ladefoged, 1959: 402), and there seems to be good evidence for the planning of speech to be in stretches longer than a word, e.g. Ladefoged's experiments with placing ‘dot’ at different parts of a sentence (Ladefoged, 1959).