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. Cro ss-speaker variability in intonation was investigated through analysis of d ata 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 lin guistic and communicative function in their own speech, and also how they p erceive and interpret these features. Although then were no significant eff ects of gender or age in isolation on prosodic performance. there was a sma ll effect of educational level among younger adults. Despite this group hom ogeneity, qualitative analysis of data from two of the production tasks sho wed considerable variation across participants in their use of prosodic fea tures, suggesting that speakers' realization of communicative functions thr ough prosody is more variable than has hitherto been assumed.