Pitch Contours of the Russian Polar Question by Bulgarian Speakers of Russian

The prosody of the Russian language is the most difficult aspect even for Bulgarian university graduates in Russian language studies. The aim of this paper is to determine the pitch contours Bulgarian students use when asking yes-no questions in Russian. The materials include samples of mini dialogues in Russian and Bulgarian. Six Bulgarian native speakers were recorded reading the dialogues. The pitch accents and intonation patterns in the recording of each Bulgarian student were compared with dialogue readings by native speakers. The sound files were analyzed acoustically and labelled manually in Praat using ToRI. The results allow to predict possible deviations from the norms of the prosodic system in a non-native language.