The prosodic marking of information status in Malaysian English

This paper investigates the prosodic strategies used by Malaysian speakers of English to mark the information status of new and given discourse elements. Thirty speakers of Malaysian English were recorded both when playing a game designed by Swerts, Krahmer, and Avesani (2002) to elicit semi-spontaneous speech and when reading out a 179-word story. Pitch accent placement in the semi-spontaneous speech was analysed auditorily, while six given and new word pairs in each reading passage were analysed acoustically in terms of the phonetic realisation of the pitch accent (following Atterer and Ladd 2004). In addition, 11 speakers of Malaysian English participated in a perception experiment testing their identification of new and given discourse elements in these recordings. Results show that Malaysian speakers of English do not mark given and new information with distinct pitch accent placement and that it is not possible to categorise these utterance elements unambiguously according to their information status. The acoustic analysis showed that given information is marked by a later pitch trough and a smaller rise than new information. No difference between the two, however, was found in terms of pitch peak alignment.