The paper presents an analysis of pitch accent inventory and tonal alignment of the accentual rise in the speech of university educated Indian English speakers from four L1 backgrounds (Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu). The results reveal that all speakers produced a high and a rising pitch accent, but with differences in the distribution of H* vs. L*+H between speakers. In addition, L1 speakers of Hindi and Bengali used L*+H in both nuclear and prenuclear contexts, contrary to the speech of L1 Telugu and Tamil speakers, who frequently produced the H* accent on nuclear accented words. An examination of peak alignment provides further evidence that the accentual rise corresponds to a bitonal pitch accent; the alignment of the H tone however shows a large degree of intra- and inter-speaker variation, and earlier timed peaks relative to the accented syllable offset for L1 Tamil speakers.
Cite as: Maxwell, O., Payne, E. (2018) Pitch accent types and tonal alignment of the accentual rise in Indian English(es). Proc. Speech Prosody 2018, 942-946, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-190
@inproceedings{maxwell18_speechprosody,
author={Olga Maxwell and Elinor Payne},
title={{Pitch accent types and tonal alignment of the accentual rise in Indian English(es)}},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2018},
pages={942--946},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-190}
}