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The intelligibility of everyday speech is built on the mastery and the use of appropriate intonation patterns. This makes intonation the music of everyday speech of which its appropriate use has been the final hurdle that the majority of the speakers of English as a Second Language have not crossed. This paper investigated the intonation patterns of the randomly selected 45 bilingual educated speakers of English, from diverse educational backgrounds representing the three senatorial zones in Ebonyi State. A paragraph from Roach (2010) was given to the participants to read. It was recorded and converted to WAVE audio with the use of audio converter. The utterances of interest to the research were extracted with the use of Sony Sound Forge and segmented on a text grid window on Praat. Pierrehumbert's Auto-segmental Metrical approach to intonation served as the theoretical framework and the transcription was done using ToBI. The study revealed a low level of proficiency in the use and assignment of accurate patterns of intonation in the speeches of the participants. Aside the widely known and commonly used intonation patterns of fall, rise, rise-fall and fall-rise, it was observed that there was the presence of the use of low pitch accent, low boundary tone in the speeches of the participants. Significant inclination towards the use of the falling tone was observed. However, bilingual make-up or educational qualification does not determine appropriate use of intonation patterns. In a bid to, therefore, account for effective communication among educated bilingual speakers of English, more time should be given to the development of this skill using meaningful utterances in context rather than the use of words or sentences in isolation.

Linguists generally acknowledge that there exists an inevitable inter-relationship between different levels of linguistic analysis--phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Various linguistic labels are used to describe such a link. In particular, there exists a bridge between the phonology and morphology of particular languages. The term "morphophonemics" is generally used to describe linguistic statements that can be made of the phonemic structure of morphemes and their effect on the grammatical content of languages. This paper basically attempts a morphophonemic analysis of inflectional morphemes of nouns in two structurally and historically distinct languages (English and Ibibio) in order to discover points of differences and similarities using the Contrastive Analysis (CA) model of investigation as its theoretical framework. The results indicate that the two languages are structurally different. For instance, Ibibio is agglutinative, tonal and analytic in nature while English is basically analytic and intonational. The paper, therefore, analyzes the problem that the Ibibio speaker of English is likely to encounter in the study of the English word structure. Again, based on its findings, the paper corroborates Greenberg's (1964) and Essien's (2003) classifications of African and Southern Nigerian languages respectively.

Different types of stress, rhythm, and intonation used by Nigerian speakers of English are analyzed, and lexical differences are discussed. Problems with vowels, consonants, and syllable structure are also covered. (SW)

Much of the research on the phonology of aphasics has neglected the suprasegmentals. Therefore, this paper examined the suprasegmental features of the phonology of 20 bilingual Nigerian adult aphasics, who were bilingual in Nigerian English and Yoruba. Their renditions of a normative text were tape-recorded. Optimality Theory served as the theoretical framework. Syllable simplification and modification were noticed. The stress and intonation patterns were not significantly affected, except in few cases. The rhythm of their speech was characterized by syllables and pauses occurring at roughly regular intervals. Thus, Syllable-Pause Timing is proposed to account for the rhythm of their speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nigerian English (NigE) prosody has often been described as strikingly different from Standard English varieties such as British English (BrE) and American English. One possible source for this is the influence of the indigenous tone languages of Nigeria on NigE. This paper investigates the effects of the language contact between the structurally diverse prosodic systems of English and the three major Nigerian languages. Reading passage style and semi-spontaneous speech by speakers of NigE, BrE, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba were analysed acoustically in terms of speech rhythm, syllable structure and tonal structure. Results show that NigE prosody combines elements of intonation / stress languages and tone languages. In terms of speech rhythm, syllable structure and syllable length, NigE groups between the Nigerian languages and BrE. NigE tonal properties are different from those of an intonation language such as BrE insofar as tones are associated with syllables and have a grammatical function. Accentuation in NigE is different from BrE in terms of both accent placement and realisation; accents in NigE are associated with high tone. A proposal for a first sketch of NigE intonational phonology is made and parallels are drawn with other New Englishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]