English in Singapore: Phonetic Research on a Corpus

by David Deterding, Adam Brown, Low Ee Ling

This book is a collection of works on research into the pronunciation of Singapore English by scholars from Singapore, Asia (Japan, Taiwan), Europe (the United Kingdom, Germany), Australia and the United States of America. The book focuses on two broad • specific features of Singapore English vowels, consonants, stress and intonation • the intelligibility of Singapore English to listeners from around the world The second area is of great interest to Singaporeans as it is important to ascertain how intelligible this prominent and vibrant Asian variety of English is internationally and not just intra-nationally. The common feature of all the chapters is that they make use of data from the NIE Corpus of Spoken Singapore English, which consists of high-quality recordings that are ideally suited to detailed phonetic research. Therefore, even though the researchers are investigating a wide range of different topics connected with pronunciation, all the studies maintain a focus on the same corpus of data. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM, containing the whole corpus and the extracts used in the chapters. The CD-ROM will be useful to any reader who wishes to listen to the actual speech samples used by the researchers. The final chapter of the book is a bibliography of over 250 references on research into the pronunciation of Singapore English. The book will be of great value to researchers, and post-graduate and undergraduate students of the phonetics of world varieties of English.

Paperback

First published July 1, 2006