Phonetic Cues to Accentual Prominence in Bengali English

This paper examines the acoustic correlates of accentual prominence in English spoken by L1 Bengali speakers. The acoustic phonetic correlates of stressed unaccented vowels, and stressed vowels produced in positions of narrow focus were compared. As observed for many varieties of English, the main correlates of accentual prominence in narrow focused contexts were presence of/and extent of f0 movement throughout the stressed vowel, followed by a concomitant increase in RMS-db. Vowels were also longer compared to stressed unaccented vowels although the differences were relatively small and highly variable.