Perception and Interpretation of English Intonation
Perception and Interpretation of English Intonation

Summary/Abstract: This paper investigated the perception and interpretation of a sub-class of sentence intonation by some Lithuanian users of English. In a test administered to ninety first-year university students of English at VPU, they obtained 83,8% correct perception of changes in intonation but obtained only 48,9% correct interpretation of the meanings normally associated with the intonation contours on the ten sentences played back to them. It was concluded from the analysis that the concept of intonation was well known to the subjects, though the attempt to teach them English intonation through its structural analysis appeared not to have been fully successful. The study recommends that emphasis should be placed on the teaching of the social meaning of English intonation to non-native learners instead of the analysis of its phonological structure.

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