Linguistic and Extra-linguistic Correlates of English Palato-Alveolar Fricatives in Educated Nigerian English
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Date
2019-06
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Publisher
English Scholars’ Association of Nigeria
Abstract
This study examined the linguistic and extra-linguistic correlates of
palato-alveolar fricatives in Educated Nigerian English (ENE) with a
view to determining the influence of orthography, gender and
phonetic training on the realisations of the English palato-alveolar
fricatives /ʃ/ and /ʒ/. The data for the study were generated from the
reading performance of one hundred Nigerian university
undergraduates (46 males and 54 females) conveniently sampled
from two universities in Osun State. They were stratified into
professional and non-professional groups based on their exposure to
training in phonetics. Findings revealed that graphological
representations had huge impacts on how speakers perceived and
subsequently pronounced /ʃ/ and /ʒ/, as some graphemes aided the
realisations of both variables while some constrained them. Results
further showed that speakers' gender had no significant influence on
the realisations of both the /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ variables; whereas, a
significant relationship was established between phonetic training
and the variable /ʒ/, as the professional group performed
significantly better than the non-professional group. The study, thus,
underscores the importance of exposure to phonetic training in
overcoming the graphophonemic challenges of non-native speakers
of English.
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Keywords
Palato-alveolar fricatives, Educated Nigerian English, Phonetic training, Gender, Orthography