Celtic English Continuum in Pitch Patterns of Spontaneous Talk: Evidence of Long-Term Contacts

• Published in: Speech and Computer Vol. 13721; pp. 128 - 138
• Main Authors: Chubarova, Maria, Shevchenko, Tatiana
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2022; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Celtic English (Welsh, Irish, Scottish); Continuum; Pitch patterns; Spontaneous speech
• ISBN: 3031209796; 9783031209796
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-20980-2_12

The present study addresses the issue of national identities of young urban citizens in Celtic regions (Irish, Welsh, Scottish) manifested by pitch patterns in their spontaneous English speech. We believe that intonation may be an identifying factor due to the specific shape, distribution, frequency of usage of pitch patterns and their association with duration and pitch span. Corpora data of 36 adolescents from five British and Irish cities, equally balanced for gender, engaged in interactive tasks which elicited unprepared talk, were processed audio-visually, measured for FO, duration and pitch span and statistically tested. Our goal is to shift emphasis from variation which previous research on reading context-free sentences found “a potential for miscommunication’ to common Celtic features in actual communication. The results suggest that residents of the areas which are known for long-term language contacts and common history are more likely to preserve their common pitch patterns. The overall picture of Celtic pitch patterns’ continuum with typical rises, levels and rise-falls suggests that long-term contacts created long-standing patterns which might provide for successful across-dialect communication.