ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2006
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2006

Intonational variation in adolescent conversational speech: rural versus urban patterns

Janet Fletcher, Deborah Loakes

The conversational speech of ten female adolescents was analyzed with a view to determining whether there is intonational variation between rural and urban varieties in Australian English. The data revealed that urban females use marginally more 'uptalk' (i.e. high rising terminals) than their rural counterparts with syntactic declarative utterances. Aspects of intonational variation are presented in terms of a prevailing intonational model of English, and discourse annotation schema.