Prosodic Variation in Southern British English

A neglected aspect of intonation research has been the nature and extent of variability in the use of prosodic features within a speech community.Crossspeaker variability in intonation was investigated through analysis of data collected from 90 adult speakers of English from London, England, using a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Language and speech 2000-07, Vol.43 (3), p.309-334
Main Authors: Peppé, Sue, Maxim, Jane, Wells, Bill
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Adults
Aged
Aphasia
British English
Community Relations
Dialect Studies
Educational attainment
England
English
English (British)
English (Second Language)
Female
Foreign Countries
Gender
Humans
Individual Differences
Intonation
Language
Language Tests
Language Variation
Linguistics
Male
Middle Aged
Mutual Intelligibility
Oral Language
Phonemes
Phonetics
Phonology
Prosodic features
Qualitative research
Semantics
Social Class
Sociolinguistic variations
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics and ethnolinguistics
Speech
Speech Acoustics
Speech Communication
Speech communities
Speeches
Studies
Suprasegmentals
Testing
University colleges
Vowels
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Description
Summary:A neglected aspect of intonation research has been the nature and extent of variability in the use of prosodic features within a speech community.Crossspeaker variability in intonation was investigated through analysis of data collected from 90 adult speakers of English from London, England, using a new prosodic test battery (PEPS). PEPS is designed to elicit information about how speakers use prosodic features to realize different types of linguistic and communicative function in their own speech, and also how they perceive and interpret these features. Although there were no significant effects of gender or age in isolation on prosodic performance, there was a small effect of educational level among younger adults. Despite this group homogeneity,qualitative analysis of data from two of the production tasks showed considerable variation across participants in their use of prosodic features,suggesting that speakers'realization of communicative functions through prosody is more variable than has hither to been assumed.
ISSN:0023-8309
1756-6053
DOI:10.1177/00238309000430030501