A phonetic definition of fluency in natural discourse makes it possible to develop a set of procedures to measure fluency empirically. An analysis of changes in oral communication skills of five American adult learners provides an illustration of how these procedures work. These adults participated in a five-week study abroad program in Spanish. Their overall language proficiency before their departure ranged from Intermediate Low to Advanced, on the ACTFL's OPI scale. Four participants moved to higher intra-major levels, but not to higher inter-major levels. The subjective analysis of the recordings shows that most of these changes are reflected in vocabulary acquisition and more ease in discourse interaction of the four participants. According to the procedures developed in the present analysis, only two participants improved their pronunciation. The results using the present procedures correlate with OPI results.

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This study uses musical notation to describe speech prosody in connected speech in Brazilian Portuguese and Mexican Spanish, using English as a comparison where needed. Through this research we establish the basis on which to expand our future work on speech prosody, from methodology to data collection and analyses, and then make initial observations regarding potentially significant prosodic patterns. This study shows that musical notation can inform us about: 1) the pitch ranges of the speakers in connected speech; 2) speech rate; 3) patterns of moraic and non-moraic syllables; 4) syllable timing; 5) intonation patterns, especially speakers' tessitura. The methodology that we have developed in this exploratory study may help solve unpredictable patterns of speech prosody, especially in regards to intonation, and consequently lead to the improvement of current speech prosody models.

This investigation discusses the implementation of computerbased teaching of Spanish pronunciation, especially intonation, in the classroom. It examines the potential and the actual use of a technologically-based system, and the results of such a system in the improvement of students' pronunciation in one semester of instruction. The effects of instructional technology were studied through recordings of students made at the beginning and end of a semester. Their recordings were evaluated by native speakers of Spanish in two ways. First, native speakers evaluated the overall pronunciation of each recording according to a scale from 0-8, using 8 as the equivalent of native speaker pronunciation. Then, the native speakers were asked to give their intuitive evaluation of the language musicality of the same recordings. In this second task, native speakers were asked to decide if the recordings of second language learners sounded: (0) not like singing, (1) a little like singing, (2) much like singing, and (3) so much singing that it was annoying.Quantitative analysis of the overall results is still undetermined, despite possible improvement in nearly 40-50% of participating students. More promising and revealing, however, is the qualitative analysis of the data, and the experiment itself, all of which reveal significant information in favor of the present technology.

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Musical Speech is a new methodology for transcribing speech prosody using musical notation. The methodology presented in this paper is an updated version of our work [12]. Our work is situated in a historical context with a brief survey of the literature of speech melodies, in which we highlight the pioneering works of John Steele, Leoš Janáček, Engelbert Humperdinck, and Arnold Schoenberg, followed by a linguistic view of musical notation in the analysis of speech. Finally, we present the current state-of-the-art of our innovative methodology that uses a quarter-tone scale for transcribing speech, and shows some initial results of the application of this methodology to prosodic transcription.

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