Date of Award
5-1-2015
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Applied Linguistics
First Advisor
Carstens, Vicki
Abstract
The present study examined the pronunciation of the English post-alveolar fricative /ʒ/ and the English affricate /dʒ/ by 20 Najdi Arabic speakers learning ESL in the US. One of these sounds, /ʒ/, is not present in the Najdi phonemic inventory, while /dʒ/ is. The instrument consisted of a list of 20 words containing the investigated phonemes (10 words for each phoneme). The results for English /ʒ/ indicated that Najdi ESL speakers faced difficulties in pronouncing this sound. Specifically, final position was more difficult for the participants than medial position. Frequency of the words could have played a role since the words containing the target sound in the word-final position were less frequency than the words containing the sounds in word-medial position. On the other hand, English /dʒ/ showed few production errors, which occurred among only seven of the participants. These errors were could be described as hypercorrection errors because participants replaced a phoneme present in their L1 inventory (/dʒ/) with one that was absent from their L1 inventory (/ʒ/). In general, the result supported Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH), Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH), and Language Transfer Theory (LTT).
Access
This thesis is only available for download to the SIUC community. Others should
contact the interlibrary
loan department of your local library.