The Trini Sing-Song: Sociophonetic variation in Trinidadian English prosody and differences to other varieties.

The current study provides a phonetic perspective on the questions of whether a high degree of variability in pitch may be considered a characteristic, endonormative feature of Trinidadian English (TrinE) at the level of speech production and contribute to what is popularly described as 'sing-song' prosody. Based on read and spontaneous data from 111 speakers, we analyze pitch level, range, and dynamism in TrinE in comparison to Southern Standard British (BrE) and Educated Indian English (IndE) and investigate sociophonetic variation in TrinE prosody with a view to these global F0 parameters. Our findings suggest that a large pitch range could potentially be considered an endonormative feature of TrinE that distinguishes it from other varieties (BrE and IndE), at least in spontaneous speech.

Automatic alignment for New Englishes: Applying state-of-the-art aligners to Trinidadian English.

While forced alignment has become an essential part of data processing in phonetic research, state-of-the-art aligners are often exclusively tailor-made for majority dialects, such as American English(es). This paper provides the first in-depth investigation into the reliability of popular pre-trained aligners in New Englishes-the nativized, postcolonial Englishes spoken world-wide. Using manually aligned data from Trinidadian English, the paper examines popular aligners [Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction (FAVE), Munich Automatic Segmentation (MAUS), and the Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA)] and their performances in automatically segmenting Trinidadian speech.