Adam J. Chong

Towards a model of Singaporean English intonational phonology

Singaporean English (SgE) is a variety of English spoken in Singapore. Recent research has sought to identify the systematic features that make SgE distinct from other varieties of English. Although the intonation of SgE has been described previously [Deterding (1994), Lim (2004), Ng (2011)], no phonological model has yet been proposed. This paper proposes a model of intonational phonology for SgE within the Autosegmental-Metrical phonology framework. Three native speakers were recorded reading declarative and question sentences of varying length and stress pattern. Preliminary results suggest that SgE has three prosodic units above the word: the Accentual Phrase (AP), Intermediate Phrase (ip) and Intonational Phrase (IP). An AP is slightly larger than a word and is characterized by a general LH (rising) contour. The L can be attributable to either an L* tone on a lexically-stressed syllable or an L initial boundary tone if the stressed syllable occurs late in the AP. The AP-final syllable always has a phonologically High boundary tone (Ha). The initial AP is realized in a large pitch range, and subsequent APs within the same ip are realized in successively reduced pitch ranges. Tones of larger prosodic units will also be discussed.

Variation in English infant-directed speech

In adult-directed speech (ADS), words are rarely produced canonically. Infant-directed speech (IDS) has been argued to contain more canonical productions. However, recent analyses show that IDS is as variable as ADS. Then, how could infants learn to privilege canonical forms, as has been shown for adult listeners? Previous research on variation in IDS has focused on word-final productions. In this study, we investigate whether the extent of variation in IDS differs by the position of a segment in a word. We sampled IDS to 6 infants between 16 and 24-mo-old from the Providence corpus. Utterances with /t/, /d/, /n/, /s/ and /z/ were identified orthographically, forced-aligned, corrected, and transcribed by 3 phonetically-trained native speakers of English. This yielded 28,775 segment tokens in word initial, medial and final position. Results confirmed that IDS is at least as variable as ADS (canonical pronunciations < 50%). However, variation was limited to coda positions; on average, over 90% of onsets wer...

The accentual phrase in Singapore English

This paper reports on a speech production experiment that explores whether the accentual phrase (AP) represents an abstract level of prosodic phrasing in Singapore English. Specifically, it tests whether the right edge of the AP is associated with phrase-final lengthening, the degree of which can be distinguished from lengthening associated with the intonational phrase (IP). Target words were produced in matched sentence contexts in 3 phrasal positions: AP-medial (wordfinal), AP-final, and IP-final. As predicted, target words in AP-final position were longer than those in AP-medial position and shorter than those in IP-final position. Analysis of target duration and f0 together shows that AP boundaries are well discriminated from medial positions. Together, these results strongly support an AP level of phrasing for Singapore English and highlight its role in predicting timing variability.

Online perception of coda glottalization in American English

In American English, voiceless codas /t, p/ are often realized with glottalization on the preceding vowel. Previous claims suggest that such glottalization can serve to enhance /t/ or, more generally, voicelessness of coda stops. This study examines the timecourse of word recognition to test these claims. 40 American English listeners participated in an eye-tracking study, where they heard synthesized glottalized and non-glottalized versions of CVC English words ending in /p, t, b, d/ while looking at a display with two words presented orthographically. Target words were presented with a minimal pair differing in place of articulation (e.g., cop-cot), or voicing (e.g., bat-bad, cap-cab). Our results indicate that listeners fixated to target words ending in /t/ marginally faster when they heard the glottalized version and when the competitor presented was a word ending in /p/. Glottalization did not result in faster fixation to targets for words ending in /p/. We also found a strong inhibitory effect—lower...