Prosodic variation in southern British English.

A neglected aspect of intonation research has been the nature and extent of variability in the use of prosodic features within a speech community. Cross-speaker variability in intonation was investigated through analysis of data collected from 90 adult speakers of English from London, England, using a new prosodic test battery (PEPS). PEPS is designed to elicit information about how speakers use prosodic features to realize different types of linguistic and communicative function in their own speech, and also how they perceive and interpret these features. Although there were no significant effects of gender or age in isolation on prosodic performance, there was a small effect of educational level among younger adults. Despite this group homogeneity, qualitative analysis of data from two of the production tasks showed considerable variation across participants in their use of prosodic features, suggesting that speakers' realization of communicative functions through prosody is more variable than has hitherto been assumed.