Prosody In The English Of Igbo First Language Undergraduates At The Noun Awka Study Centre

Background: The study finds that the prosody of the Awka group can be best described as a single remapping of English prosody onto Igbo pitch grammar, a remapping that the low classroom contact appears to sharpen, and suggests that the specific points of tranJsfer identified can be used to provide targeted, self-study pronunciation support. Objective: This study examines the prosody (stress, rhythm and intonation) of the English language spoken by undergraduates of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), Study Centre, Awka, Nigeria, a population whose first language is Igbo and whose prosody has received little attention in the literature. In the framework of the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) model, it examines the question of whether the forward stress, syllable timing and falling tone reported for Igbo English elsewhere are three independent features, or three aspects of the same feature, and whether a decrease in classroom contact accentuates the transfer from the lexical-tonal grammar of Igbo. The results reveal late word stress, fixed word stress, strong syllable timing, and a falling tone for intonation, even on yes/no questions where English would expect a rising tone, and an imported low boundary tone that is repeated across different types of utterances. Methods: One hundred students were recorded on a word list, a passage and free speech using a mixed auditory and acoustic design, and a twenty-speaker sub-sample analysed acoustically in Praat. Results: These results are interpreted as five surface manifestations of a single underlying cause: the level high-tone habit, the phrase-final low tone, the stability and floating of tone, downdrift, and the weak role of stress in Igbo. Conclusion: