Phonetic stress in Indian English vs. American English.

A recent article in World Englishes (Pickering and Wiltshire, 2000) suggests that one difference between Indian English (IE) and American English (AE) varieties is the phonetic realization of prominence. In IE, the syllable considered prominent by Pickering and Wiltshire falls in pitch, while the amplitude changes little. In this study, we show that the results of Pickering and Wiltshire (2000) may be due to a misinterpretation of the positioning of stress in IE. We show that by considering the louder syllable to be the stressed one, IE stress correlates differ in magnitude but not in direction from AE. However, our results confirm Pickering and Wiltshire's in that the phonetic correlates of AE and IE stressed syllables do differ; furthermore, the position of stress may differ, and hence the potential for communication problems between speakers of different varieties remains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]