The present paper investigates the production and perception of rising intonation patterns in first language (L1) speakers of Belfast English and native German learners of English with and without previous exposure to the Belfast variety of English (BfE). Whilst there is evidence that Northern Standard German (NSG) predominantly uses falling nuclear pitch patterns in declaratives, Swiss German (SG) esp. the variety spoken in Bern [6] and BfE were previously found to produce mainly rising pitch patterns in nuclear position of declaratives. The paper investigates the question if rising pitch patterns produced by SG speakers are transferred into their L2 BfE and if so, do these cross-language similarities result in different ratings of foreign accent compared to NSG speakers. Thus two issues are addressed: (i) target association vs. target alignment and (ii) the effect of cross-varietal differences in L1 on the success of L2 acquisition.
Cite as: Ulbrich, C. (2010) Belfast intonation in L2 speech. Proc. Speech Prosody 2010, paper 963
@inproceedings{ulbrich10_speechprosody,
author={Christiane Ulbrich},
title={{Belfast intonation in L2 speech}},
year=2010,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2010},
pages={paper 963}
}