Abstract
This chapter shows that the production differences between Indian English and British English in speech rhythm (documented in the previous chapter) are also relevant in the perception of speech. Even if differences in the production of speech rhythm between two varieties are large and significant, it is not a foregone conclusion that they play any role in the perception of speech. Extending previous research on the importance of segmental and supra-segmental cues in the perception of accent differences, a partially new technique will be introduced which consists of the selective transfer and suppression of segmental and supra-segmental cues. Utterances that were manipulated in this way are then used in two types of experiments. The first set of experiments consists of an accent identification task, where participants have to decide whether a speaker is of Indian or British origin. These experiments were designed to determine whether differences in speech rhythm (defined as variability in duration), in intonation or segmental differences are a stronger cue for accent identification. In the second set of experiments, participants have to focus on one of two simultaneous speakers. Here the research question is whether differences in speech rhythm, intonation or segmental differences help listeners more when trying to understand the target speaker. Overall, both types of experiments show that the difference in speech rhythm between Indian English and British English is perceptually relevant. Participants used speech rhythm as an acoustic cue to identify the origin of a talker, even if acoustic cues other than speech rhythm were suppressed. Talkers with a more syllable-timed rhythm were assigned significantly more often to the ‘Indian’ group than talkers with a more stress-timed rhythm, who, in turn, were assigned more frequently to the ‘British’ group.
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Notes
- 1.
All stimuli were processed with Praat (Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer (Computer Program). Version 5.3.04).
- 2.
Another option would have been to manipulate the durations of unstressed syllables (see Hertrich and Ackermann 1998). However, Chap. 6 showed that the variability of vocalic durations shows much more robust differences between IndE and BrE than the variability of syllable durations, which suggests that vocalic durations rather than syllable durations should be manipulated in the experiments.
- 3.
Part of the results presented in this section has been published with a different focus in Fuchs (2015d). Results vary to a small degree because in the present work a logistic regression model was used after collapsing the interval-scaled response variable to a binary variable (‘British’ and ‘somewhat British’ merged to ‘British’, and ‘Indian’ and ‘somewhat Indian’ to ‘Indian’). In Fuchs (2015d), a linear regression model was used.
- 4.
The sentences were taken from the reading passage used as the basis for the rhythm measurements in Chap. 6. They read ‘The suspect, who cannot be named, works as a hairdresser in Carter Town’ and ‘Eugene’s hairdressers has a fine reputation due to the long-standing service of Peter Beard and Barbara Detman’.
- 5.
This includes another condition (with a total of 12 stimuli) that addressed a hypothesis not related to the research questions discussed here. For the purposes of the present discussion, these 12 stimuli can be regarded as fillers.
- 6.
Participants were asked to enumerate all languages they know in decreasing order of proficiency. L1 is defined here as the first language in the list of languages that is not English.
- 7.
These factors were not considered in the pilot study because they were either not applicable (sentence) or the number of participants was considered too small to make valid distinctions based on them (school and L1).
- 8.
The present experiment is similar to Cushing and Dellwo (2010) in many respects and the same Praat scripts were used for preparing stimuli and running the experiment, except for the IndE recordings and the manipulation of the stimuli. I would like thank Volker Dellwo for providing the BrE recordings and the Praat scripts for this experiment.
- 9.
These are the only rhythm conditions that include pairs of stimuli involving only naturalistic rhythm resynthesis, but they also contain some stimuli with artificial rhythm resynthesis. Even under these circumstances difference rhythm has less influence than intonation, and the influence of difference rhythm is very unlikely to be greater if these conditions were restricted to exclusively naturalistic rhythm resynthesis.
- 10.
Some groups were presented with only 253 stimuli, which was caused by the stimulus selection script choosing the same stimulus twice.
- 11.
I would like to thank Ganesh Sinisetty, Angana Adhikari and Chandrasekar Kandharaja for the help with recruiting participants and running the experiment.
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Fuchs, R. (2016). The Perception of Speech Rhythm in Indian English and British English. In: Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English. Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47818-9_7
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