Research on the perception of intonational categories in English shows that listeners can accurately distinguish new and given information (narrow versus broad focus) on the basis of f0 (e.g., Rump & Collier, 1986; Breen at... [ view full abstract ]
Research on the perception of intonational categories in English shows that listeners can accurately distinguish new and given information (narrow versus broad focus) on the basis of f0 (e.g., Rump & Collier, 1986; Breen at al., 2010). However, to date there is little knowledge about the prosodic systems of "new" Englishes, which are often influenced by their typologically distinct substrate languages (Gussenhoven, 2014).
This study investigates the way that Indian English (IndE) listeners process focus structure in IndE and Australian English. Understanding cross-dialectal processing of prosody is important because it sheds light on the ways language users process information, and helps us better understand the link between speech perception and production. IndE is particularly interesting given the limited quantitative sociophonetic research into its prosodic system in addition to a substantial amount of variability in the production of focus structure (Wiltshire & Harnsberger, 2006; Moon, 2002; Maxwell, 2014)
We report on a perception experiment conducted with 33 speakers of IndE (Hyderabad, India) with four different L1s (Bengali, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu) and schooling backgrounds (catholic, private or government), each of which provides a contrasting linguistic context due to the differences in the type of input.
Results show that broad focus was more difficult to identify than narrow focus (36% correct versus 89-97% respectively), consistent with research on established Englishes (Welby, 2003; Breen et al., 2010). Examination of incorrect responses further reveals that IndE listeners tend to miscategorise broad focus as either subject or object narrow focus. Results are modelled using multinomial mixed effects logistic regression. Variables that affected responses were listeners’ L1 and the type of school attended (catholic and private versus government).Â
This study highlights two important sociolinguistic variables that drive the processing of information amongst this group: L1 and schooling type. The study also shows that the listeners may be drawing variably on two systems in their processing of intonation: one that is influenced by their L1, interpreting broad focus as subject focus, and one that is more "mainstream" (e.g. British or Australian English), selecting object narrow focus in place of broad.
