Uptalk in L2 English: the phonetic identity and perception of final declarative rises in Serbian EFL

Abstract

AbstractUptalk has been increasingly documented in different L1 English varieties and communicative contexts, but is rarely recognized in formal L2 educational contexts, where it is still attributed to learners’ inadequate mastery of intonation. This study is a cross-sectional corpus-based exploration of the phonetic realization of uptalk in Serbian EFL students’ semi-spontaneous expository speech, and its perception as a sentence-finality signal. The corpus comprised all rising intonation units (IU) produced by 14 female and 9 male participants, classified by structural clues as syntactic continuation, listing, polar questions, or uptalk, to explore the relatedness of the phonetic properties to structural position and gender. Next, 100 EFL students rated selected phrases, illustrating continuation rises, uptalk, and final falls, as possibly sentence final, on a 5-point scale. The findings showed that uptalk was consistently produced as a phonetically distinct signal, characterized by a larger pitch excursion, a steeper rise slope, a higher rise peak, and a longer post-IU pause. Females produced wider pitch excursions and steeper slopes. Uptalk examples were ranked high as possible sentence-finality signals. The study suggests that EFL speakers’ uptalk should be recognized as a novel socio-pragmatic prosodic device, deliberately used even in more formal academic contexts.