This book addresses the question whether Educated Indian English is more
syllable-timed than British English from two standpoints: production and
perception. Many post-colonial varieties of English, which are mostly
spoken as a second language in countries such as India, Nigeria and the
Philippines, are thought to have a syllable-timed rhythm, whereas first
language varieties such as British English are characterized as being
stress-timed. While previous studies mostly relied on a single acoustic
correlate of speech rhythm, usually duration, the author proposes a
multidimensional approach to the production of speech rhythm that takes
into account various acoustic correlates. The results reveal that the
two varieties differ with regard to a number of dimensions, such as
duration, sonority, intensity, loudness, pitch and glottal stop
insertion. The second part of the study addresses the question whether
the difference in speech rhythm between Indian and British English is
perceptually relevant, based on intelligibility and dialect
discrimination experiments. The results reveal that speakers generally
find the rhythm of their own variety more intelligible and that
listeners can identify which variety a speaker is using on the basis of
differences in speech rhythm.