Question intonation patterns in Nigerian English

Abstract

This study investigates the intonation patterns in wh-questions and yes/no-questions used by educated Nigerian speakers of English. It examines the possible influence of gender, ethnicity, and question type on the prosodic marking of questions. Audio recordings taken from the Nigerian component of the International Corpus of English were annotated in Praat using the tones and breaks indices transcription convention. The results show that there are similar intonation patterns among Nigerian speakers. Both wh-questions and yes/no-questions tend to start with a level tone; while wh-questions end mostly with a falling tone, yes/no-questions end either with a falling or a rising tone. The results demonstrate that whereas gender has no significant effect, both ethnicity and question type significantly influence intonation patterns.