Suprasegmental Features of Bulgarian English Speech
Suprasegmental Features of Bulgarian English Speech

Summary/Abstract: The suprasegmental characteristics of English speech constitute a well-known area of difficulty even for fairly advanced Bulgarian learners of the language. However, no systematic research has been carried out into these problems, not least because of the lack of an established theoretical and methodological framework for such investigation. The present study makes a first step towards filling this gap. It presents results from a contrastive study of stress and intonation in the speech of tertiary-level Bulgarian students of English. Six students read and recorded the Bulgarian and the English version of Aesop’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun” – a standard text used in phonetic research. The recordings were analyzed acoustically and labelled intonationally in Praat using ToBI A number of long-term distributional measures were obtained, namely, mean and median fundamental frequency (F0), pitch minima and maxima, pitch span, temporal characteristics such as mean syllable, intonation phrase (IP) and pause duration, as well as number of IPs, pauses, stressed and unstressed syllables. The results were next compared with data from recordings of the fable by native English Received Pronunciation (RP) speakers. Differences between Bulgarian, Bulgarian English and British English RP were found in terms of F0 measures, IP duration and number, as well as in the number of pauses, stressed and unstressed syllables. These results are discussed within the framework of a newly proposed model of L2 intonation learning (Mennen, 2015).

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