The intelligibility of Mexican students when pronouncing English voiceless stops
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Keywords
Intelligibility, Mexican students, Voiceless stop phonemes
Abstract
One aspect of pronunciation that can be difficult for Mexican students of English is the articulation of phonemes since it is necessary to learn to differentiate phonemes that are perceived as corresponding due to their orthographical similarity. These phonetical challenges result in inaccurate pronunciation that may cause intelligibility problems and hinder communication with native speakers. Intelligibility, defined as the accuracy with which a listener understands a given utterance (Flege, 1988; Munro & Derwing, 1995), depends on a wide variety of factors attributed to the speaker, the listener, and the perceived signal. The aim of this study was to measure how intelligible the pronunciation Mexican students made of the English voiceless, stop, aspirated consonants, /ph , th , kh /, at the beginning of words resulted to 80 American English speakers. To achieve this, we created an intelligibility test based on word recognition in which American speakers were asked to listen to the word pronounced by a Mexican English student and write down what they thought they had heard. The results showed that the absence of aspiration produced by students caused severe intelligibility problems in the case of the phoneme /ph /, whereas phonemes /th / and / kh / resulted more intelligible. On this basis we conclude that English teachers should pay more attention to teaching the aspirated pronunciation of /ph /.
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Milagros Eugenia Pérez Sámano, Autonomous University of Queretaro, Mexico
Autonomous University of Queretaro. Milagros Eugenia Pérez Sámano is a recent graduate of the Doctorate in Linguistics from the Autonomous University of Querétaro. She obtained her Master's Degree in Linguistics from the same University and has a Bachelor's Degree in Modern Languages- English with a terminal line in Linguistics and Teaching. Her line of specialty is language acquisition and teaching.
Mónica Sanaphre Villanueva, Autonomous University of Queretaro, Mexico
Autonomous University of Queretaro. Mónica Sanaphre Villanueva is a professor and researcher at the Center for Literary and Linguistic Studies of the Faculty of Languages and Letters of the Autonomous University of Querétaro. Her main line of interest is the acquisition of English as a second or foreign language and the effective design of teaching techniques.