Southern Standard British English (SSBE) listeners of four conditions of focus in the English, Pidgin and Bamileke Bangou speech of multilinguals from Cameroon living in London. The aim is to examine the influence of the first language (L1) systems on the acquisition of English focus prosody. While the SSBE listeners could identify the focus conditions intended by the SSBE speakers, they could not do so for the Cameroon speakers. The investigation utilised recordings from a set of materials using football team names, developed to maintain lexical consistency across languages, as part of a wider examination of acoustic cues used by Cameroon speakers for focus signaling in their English, Pidgin and Bangou speech. This contributes to the discussion of how acquisition of prosodic features in a second language (L2) relates to the role of the feature in the L1.

Index Terms: focus prosody, language contact, cross linguistic perception, feature hypothesis.