A Cross-Varietal Comparison of Deaccenting and Given Information: Implications for International Intelligibility and Pronounciation Teaching

Abstract

Previous research has established that old or given information is often deaccented. The assumption is that unimportant information ought to be weakened and attenuated in speech. Consequently, given information is often deaccented and new information is usually accented in most varieties of English. However, some nonnative varieties, such as Singapore English (SE) appear not to deaccent given information. The present article seeks to investigate the apparent absence of deaccenting in SE by attempting a cross-varietal comparison with British English (BE). The data comprise three main categories of given information: repeated lexical items, anaphoric reference, and sentences that cue deaccenting by inference. Results indicate that SE speakers showed no acoustic evidence of prosodically attenuating given information unlike their BE counterparts and that in the informational domain, SE does not appear to have a comparable prosodic means of signaling new and given information. Implications are given for the international intelligibility of nonnative varieties of English that do not distinguish between new and old information via differences in accent placement. This article will also discuss ramifications for pronunciation teaching.