A contrastive study of lexical stress placement in singapore English and british English

Singapore English (SE) and British English (BE) have been claimed to differ in lexical stress placement. Examples frequently cited in the literature involve polysyllabic words such as hopelessly and compounds such as blackboard. Such words are stressed word-initially in BE, but are said to be stressed word-finally in SE. In the present paper, we investigate the acoustic evidence for the suggested cross-varietal difference. Two observations lead us to explore the claim that SE and BE differ in lexical stress placement. Firstly, all observations about stress differences between SE and BE are based solely on auditory impressions by British English listeners. The acoustic evidence for the claim has remained unexplored. Secondly, it appears that the auditory evidence comes largely from realisations of test words in citation form, i.e. in nuclear, phrase-final position. In phrase-final position, however, we can expect phrase-final lengthening, and lengthening is a cue to stress, at least in British English. If Singapore English has more phrasefinal lengthening than British English, then this effect may account for the suggested differences in lexical stress placement.