Een Cognitieve Methode Voor Het Leren Van Nederlandse Intonatie

The "Cursus Nederlandse Intonatie" (course in Dutch intonation) is a first attempt to teach the intonation of a second language according to a cognitive method, i.e. to provide the students with conscious control of the various patterns of the target language and of the different shapes in which these patterns actually appear. A necessary requirement for achieving this is to convey analytic knowledge about all the important pitch variations. Thanks to profound investigations in this field, such knowledge is now sufficiently available. The main technique applied in these investigations consisted of replacing the natural variation of F in an utterance by a stylized, much simpler artificial pitch contour whilst maintaining the overall melodic impression. This has been done for a great number of utterances; thus, it became possible to make an inventory of the essential ingredients of the artificial contours.The course is expected to be helpful not only to students of Dutch as a second language. Also to those native speakers who professionally study Dutch language and literature, it might be useful to become acquainted with this explicit description of the intonation system which they know already, but only in an implicit way.Recently, in investigation of the intonation of British English has been initiated, using the same technique as the one applied for Dutch intonation. The results obtained so far justify the expectation that a cognitive course of English intonation can be developed as well. This would be an efficient device for the numerous people who learn English as a second language.