Abstract
This study investigates the production of English initial consonant clusters by Arabic L1 learners of English and speakers of the Broad Jamaican Creole. The clusters Stop + /r/, /S/ + nasal, /S/ + stop, in addition to the production of vowel-initial words are focused on. It was found out that whereas Arab learners produced initial Stop + /r/ and /S/ + nasal words with epenthesis and /S/ + stop words with prosthesis as well as epenthesis, speakers of the Broad Jamaican Creole produced Stop + /r/ and /S/ + stop clusters according to the RP norm and /S/ + nasal with epenthesis. As for vowel-initial words, both groups resorted to the strategy of onset filling (Itô, 1989). Specifically, Arab learners produced these words with glottal stop /ʔ/ before the initial vowel, whereas the Jamaican informants inserted glottal fricative /h/ in the same position. Furthermore, the performance of the two groups was additionally analyzed in light of Optimality Theory.
Highlights
According to many linguists, the syllable must be related to phoneme distribution (Fudge, 1969; Khan, 1980; Pulgram, 1970; Selkirk, 1982, among others)
This study investigates the production of English initial consonant clusters by Arabic L1 learners of English and speakers of the Broad Jamaican Creole
Our learners managed to produce some of the following words without apparent problem: stop, star, class, school, snake, spoon, speak, glass, though most of S + stop words were modified by use of either prothesis or epenthesis
Summary
The syllable must be related to phoneme distribution (Fudge, 1969; Khan, 1980; Pulgram, 1970; Selkirk, 1982, among others) They view the syllable as an entity in the domain of which the phonotactics of the language can best be defined. We tend to find words such as chair, job, cheap, jail, but not chleap or jpudge, for instance The latter two are neither real nor potential words in English. A short vowel [I] or a schwa [ə] is inserted prothetically, in order to render them pronounceable (Broselow, 1983; Katamba, 1989) From these examples, one would conclude that constraints on syllable structures serve as a filter by allowing only certain sound sequences to occur. These constraints are language—specific, in that certain sound sequences that are well-formed syllable structures in language X may not be so in language Y, as we have seen above
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