Posters

The Role of Consonant Clusters in English as a Lingua Franca Intelligibility

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Abstract

This study attempts to add to the limited body of research on what aspects of English pronunciation affect intelligibility for non-native listeners (users of English as a lingua franca). It addresses the claim from Jenkins’ (2000; 2002) Lingua Franca Core that intelligibility will suffer if consonants are deleted from initial consonant clusters or from final clusters in ways that do not fit English phonology, and that addition of extra sounds to a cluster by epenthesis will not adversely affect intelligibility. Monosyllabic words with initial or final consonant clusters produced by talkers of different language backgrounds were played for 11 Swedish listeners, who transcribed what they heard in standard English orthography. Responses were then matched against results of an acoustic analysis. Listeners were more successful overall at identifying the intended word structure than acoustic results would indicate, and this pattern holds for stimuli with final clusters but not those with initial clusters. Deletion of one of the consonants from the cluster was shown to be the most common reason for mismatch. These results partially support the Lingua Franca Core but also demonstrate that the location of epenthesis of a vowel in relation to a consonant cluster affects the likelihood of match or mismatch. This study attempts to add to the limited body of research on what aspects of English pronunciation affect intelligibility for non-native listeners (users of English as a lingua franca). It addresses the claim from Jenkins’ (2000; 2002) Lingua Franca Core that intelligibility will suffer if consonants are deleted from initial consonant clusters or from final clusters in ways that do not fit English phonology, and that addition of extra sounds to a cluster by epenthesis will not adversely affect intelligibility. Monosyllabic words with initial or final consonant clusters produced by talkers of different language backgrounds were played for 11 Swedish listeners, who transcribed what they heard in standard English orthography. Responses were then matched against results of an acoustic analysis. Listeners were more successful overall at identifying the intended word structure than acoustic results would indicate, and this pattern holds for stimuli with final clusters but not those with initial clusters. Deletion of one of the consonants from the cluster was shown to be the most common reason for mismatch. These results partially support the Lingua Franca Core but also demonstrate that the location of epenthesis of a vowel in relation to a consonant cluster affects the likelihood of match or mismatch.

How to Cite:

Haslam, M. & Zetterholm, E., (2018) “The Role of Consonant Clusters in English as a Lingua Franca Intelligibility”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings 10(1).