15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
This paper presents the results of a study of rhythm and timing in
English spoken by Hong Kong Cantonese speakers, for whom English is
a second language. A corpus of Hong Kong English (HKE) speech data
was collected on computer, and measurements of syllable duration were
made. These measurements were then compared statistically with syllable
measurements taken from an existing corpus of British English (BrE)
speakers. Taking syllable duration as the dependent variable, this
paper looks at the effects of stress level in the two types of English.
It is found that the HKE speakers examined show less difference in
the relative syllable duration of tonic, stressed, unstressed and weakened
syllables than the BrE speakers. This is discussed with regard to
possible intelligibility problems which may arise due to divergent
English speech rhythm when a native speaker of English listens to a
Hong Kong English speaker.
Bibliographic reference. Setter, Jane (2003): "A comparison of speech rhythm in British and Hong Kong English", In ICPhS-15, 467-470.