AN ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS OF SYLLABLE WEIGHT IN EDUCATED NIGERIAN SPOKEN ENGLISH

Ubong E. Josiah ¹

Emmanuel N. Eyam ²

Department of English, University of Uyo, Nigeria ^{1 & 2}

Corresponding Email: ubongjosiah7@gmail.com ¹

Abstract

This work is entitled “An Acoustic Analysis of Syllable Weight in Educated Nigerian Spoken English. Previous studies have indicated that Nigerian-English bilinguals have difficulties in realizing prominence in English stressed and unstressed syllables. Hence, there is hardly a difference in the articulation of heavy and light syllables in the spoken English of many Nigerians. The possibility of inappropriate intelligibility among non-Nigerian listeners becomes unavoidable. This study, therefore, attempts some acoustic analyses of syllable weight in Educated Nigerian Spoken English (ENSE).  The work was anchored on the Moraic theory by Hyman (1985). The study adopts the survey research design and obtained data from a sample of 80 subjects. Twenty words containing both light and heavy syllables and a passage were presented to the respondents as the instrument for data collection. These were read and recorded with an Infinix 40i phone. The data were further uploaded into an HP laptop and analyzed both perceptually and acoustically using Praat – a software for phonetic analysis. Simple percentages were used to analyze the participant’s production and a native baseline who served as the Control was equally used for the SBE model. The researchers were interested in discovering some acoustic details like the fundamental frequency (f₀), intensity, frequency, formant structure and pausing among others. The researchers discovered that speakers of ENSE hardly realize syllable weight as it is in SBE. Light syllables were most of the times realized as heavy syllables and vice versa. It was also noted that some speakers flattened all the syllables in a word. The researchers, therefore, conclude that most ENSE users realize syllable weight in their spoken English differently from the SPE model.

Keywords: Educated Nigerian, Spoken English, Acoustic Analysis, Syllable Weigh.