Presentation: Sally
Summary: Yu-chiao
This paper utilized acoustic analyses to measure the rhythmic
patterns of Malaysian English (MalE) and Singaporean English (SgE). In order to
justify whether the languages were syllable-timed and to what extent were they
syllabled-based, the analysis was done using two rhythmic indexes, the PVI and
VarcoV, which stood for the pairwise variability index and the normalized
standard deviation of vocalic interval durations divided by the mean vocalic
duration, respectively. Ten ethnically Malay Malaysian and ten Malay
Singaporean speakers of English were recruited in the study and were carefully
controlled for ethnicity, gender, and educational background. All speakers were
asked to do three different tasks, namely, to read full-vowel-only and non-full-vowel-only
sentence sets, each of which consisted of five 8-syllable sentences, to read “the boy who cried Wolf ” text, and to
speak for approximately five minutes on the topic “My most memorable holiday”.
The PVI values obtained from the first task (the full and the reduced vowel
sentence sets), from a total of 350 vowel durations for each set of sentences,
were higher for SgE compared to MalE, suggesting that MalE is more
syllable-timed than SgE. The SgE speakers tended to reduce their vowels in the
reduced vowel sentence set whereas the MalE speakers tended not to, implying a
greater vowel-to-vowel variability in SgE compared to MalE. VarcoV was found to
be less powerful. As for the second task (the Wolf text), 25 utterances (251 vowel durations) were measured for
each speaker. The rhythm of MalE is significantly different from SgE for both
PVI and VarcoV, implying greater variability in the rhythm of SgE compared to
MalE for the Wolf passage. With very little
exception, PVI and VarcoV of the 25 SgE utterances were higher than those of the
corresponding MalE utterances, implying that the rhythm of the MalE speakers
was more syllable-timed compared to the SgE speakers. In the third task (“My
most memorable holiday”), six utterances containing eight syllables each were
selected for measurement of PVI and VarcoV for each speaker. The average values
of both PVI and VarcoV were lower for MalE, suggesting that there was less
variation in the successive vowels of Malaysians speakers compared to the
Singaporeans, and that there was less variability in the duration of vowels
compared to the duration of the SgE vowels in spontaneous speech. To sum up,
the study showed that MalE was more syllable-timed compared to SgE in both read
speech and spontaneous speech. Besides, PVI was found to be more powerful than VarcoV
in teasing out significant differences between full and reduced vowel sentence
sets and thus should be regarded as a more sensitive and robust measurement.
