Segmental repair and interactional intelligibility: The relationship between consonant deletion, consonant insertion, and pronunciation intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca in Japan

Abstract

This is a qualitative study of the relationship between consonant deletion, consonant insertion, and the pragmatic strategies that maintain mutual intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca (hereafter, ELF) interactions among university and exchange students at a Japanese university (Jenkins, 2000; Matsumoto, 2011; O’Neal, 2015). Some ELF research claims that consonant deletion attenuates mutual intelligibility in ELF interactions, especially if the consonant deletion occurs in word-initial and word-medial consonant clusters or in consonant clusters in syllable onsets and codas (Jenkins, 2000, 2007; Deterding, 2013). This study assesses the effect of consonant deletion and consonant insertion on the mutual intelligibility of pronunciation in ELF interactions in Japan. Using conversation analytic methodology to examine a corpus of miscommunications among ELF speakers at a Japanese university, within which miscommunications are defined as repair sequences, this study claims that consonant deletion can attenuate mutual intelligibility, and that the insertion of a deleted consonant into a word can help restore mutual intelligibility. Furthermore, this is true regardless of deviance from or approximation to a native speaker pronunciation standard. This study concludes that segmental repair is an effective strategy with which English speakers can maintain mutual intelligibility.