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Jordanian EFL Students’ Perception of Noncontrastive Allophonic Cues in English Speech Segmentation

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Abstract

The prominent role of allophonic cues in English speech segmentation has widely been recognized by phonologists and psycholinguists. However, very meager inquiry was devoted to analysing the perception of these noncontrastive allophonic cues by Arab EFL learners. Accordingly, the present study is an attempt to examine the exploitation of allophonic cues, mainly aspiration, glottalization and approximant devoicing to English word junctures by 40 Jordanian PhD students. Moreover, it aims to find out which allophonic cues are perceived more accurately during the segmentation process and if there is any evidence for Universal Grammar markedness. The experiment is led through a forced-choice identification task adopted from Altenberg (Second Lang Res 21:325–358, 2005) and Rojczyk et al. (Res Lang 1:15–29, 2016). The results of ANOVA unveiled that there is a statistically significant difference between the three types of allophonic cues, viz. aspiration, glottalization and approximant devoicing. This implies that the participants outperformed in stimuli marked by glottalization than by aspiration and approximant devoicing. This result provided further evidence for the universality of glottalization as a boundary cue in English speech segmentation. Overall, the Jordanian PhD students failed in perceiving the allophonic cues accurately and exploiting them to detect word boundaries. The present inquiry has the potential to provide several recommendations for syllabus designers, and second/foreign language teachers and learners.

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Funding

This research has not received any funds.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan

    Ghaleb Rabab’ah, Sara Kessar & Nimer Abusalim

  2. University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

    Ghaleb Rabab’ah

Authors
  1. Ghaleb Rabab’ah
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  2. Sara Kessar
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  3. Nimer Abusalim
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ghaleb Rabab’ah.

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Appendices

Appendix A

Aspiration and Glottalization Stimuli—Adapted from Altenberg (2005)

Aspiration Stimuli: Vowel–/s/–Consonant (VsC)

Lou spills

loose pills

Lou

oose tops

Lou skis

loose keys

lay speech

lace peach

lay stable

lace table

lay scar

lace car

Aspiration Stimuli: Consonant–/s/–Consonant (CsC)

keep sparking

keeps parking

keep stalking

keeps talking

keep scanning

keeps canning

chief sport

chief’s port

chief star

chief’s tar

chief school

chief’s cool

Aspiration Stimuli: Consonant–/s/–Consonant–Consonant (CsCC):

cook sprints

cook’s prints

cook struck

cook’s truck

cook screams

cook’s creams

top spry

tops pry

top strains

tops trains

top scrawled

tops crawled

Glottal Stop/Creaky Voice Stimuli:Vowel–Nasal–Vowel

see neither

seen either

a niche

an itch

a nice man

an ice man

see Mabel

seem able

tea mat

team at

clay manual

claim annual

Glottal Stop/Creaky Voice Stimuli: Vowel–Obstruent–Vowel

why fill

wife ill

low fate

loaf ate

low failing

loaf ailing

grey vat

grave at

we vend

weave end

say vamps

save amps

Glottal Stop/Creaky Voice Stimuli: Vowel–Liquid–Vowel

I learn

I’ll earn

say least

sail east

see love

seal of

be rolled

beer old

cue rake

cure ache

be rice

beer ice

Appendix B

Approximant Voicing/Devoicing Stimuli Adopted from Rojczyk et al., (2016)

C#S

#CS

bite rain

buy train

float weed

flow tweed

wake lock

way clock

sake west

say quest

pipe lot

pie plot

rope ride

row pride

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Rabab’ah, G., Kessar, S. & Abusalim, N. Jordanian EFL Students’ Perception of Noncontrastive Allophonic Cues in English Speech Segmentation. J Psycholinguist Res 52, 1455–1469 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-09944-5

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