Perception and representation of prosodic prominence in Singapore English

19 November 2019 par Claudia Pichon-Starke


Nous avons le plaisir de vous annoncer que le projet « Perception and representation of prosodic prominence in Singapore English » porté par Adam J. Chong (Dpt of Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London) et James S. German (LPL) a obtenu un financement de la part du British Academy Leverhulme Small Grants programme.

Résume :
“New” English varieties that have emerged in multilingual post-colonial settings often have grammatical systems which, while similar to mainstream English varieties, diverge in typologically interesting ways due to substantial amounts of language contact. In this project, we examine the nature of prosodic representations in one new English variety: Singapore English. Using speech perception and speech production tasks, we examine whether Singapore English speakers encode word-level prominence in their mental representations, and if and how speakers indicate focus using intonation. This project tackles the question of variability head-on by examining a diverse set of participants to investigate how the social and language backgrounds of individual speakers might influence their individual phonological systems. A proper understanding of the prosodic system of Singapore English not only has implications for theoretical models of its phonological system, but will also inform our understanding of the nature of linguistic representations within highly mobile and multilingual societies.