Repetition Reduction Revisited: The Prosody of Repeated Words in Papuan Malay

This phenomenon has been claimed to facilitate speech recognition and to be language universal. In particular, the relationship between the information value of a word in a discourse context and its prosodic prominence have been shown to correlate.

However, a literature review provided in this paper reveals that most evidence comes from English, where prosodic marking of information status often coincides with repetition reduction. The current study investigates to what extent repetition reduction occurs in Papuan Malay, spoken in the western part of the island of New Guinea (Indonesia). The work on Papuan Malay prosody available to date suggests fundamental differences compared to English and other Germanic languages.