The research, which involved the collation of speech models from 360 primary school students across 12 schools in the Kingston and St Andrew area, found that Jamaican English had its own distinct phonetic qualities compared the American and British Standard English.
We had to analyse the speech of Jamaican children versus two other well known varieties of English, which were the British Standard English and the American Standard English.
“Even though there is software for both versions of English, we would still need our own corpus of speech in order to develop our own software specifically for Jamaican children,” said Watson, adding that accent distinction was a minimal factor in the study.
According to Dr Coy, the study also highlighted the minimal influence of British and American Standard English on the phonetics of Jamaican English.
He also said that the nuances of Jamaican speech, given the general use of Patois and code switching between Jamaican English and the local dialect, presented a limitation in the study in that the speech recognition technology would not be equipped to assist Jamaican students who do not speak Standard English.
