Pitch accents in read speech: Black and White southern women

Abstract

Prosodic variation between African American English and General American English has been attested to in numerous works, yet few studies have collected measures of F0 in African American English and fewer have examined F0 beyond the word level. Additionally, the analysis of prosodic variation in regional dialects of American English is not well studied. F0 movement at the level of the Intonational Phrase (IP) is known to convey both local and global information. Research on F0 movement in General American English has analyzed combinations of H(igh) and (L)ow pitch accents as categorical markers of prosodic alignment to the segmental string. Understanding the alignment of F0 contours provides key information on phonetic realization and phonological alignment in the creation of intonational categories. This pilot data explores the interaction of F0, vowel duration and word duration of prenuclear and nuclear pitch accents in the read speech of Black and White southern women. This study seeks to determine if group differences exists in the expression of pitch accents between the regionally defined socio-ethnic dialects used by the two groups. Results will be discussed in terms of dialect variation.