An Error Analysis Of Initial Consonant Clusters By Chinese EFL Learners — The Perspectives Of Perception And Production

A consonant cluster is a group or sequence of two or more than two consonants that appear together in a syllable without a vowel between them. The acquisition of consonant cluster is one of the most important components in pronunciation acquisition. The relevant studies at home and abroad include two aspects: theoretical studies and empirical studies. The former mainly focuses on the definition of consonant clusters and the phonotactics, while the latter touches upon such topics as strategies adopted in acquisition of consonant clusters, the impact of phonological factors (length of cluster, phonological environment, markedness, etc.) on consonant clusters and the influence of non-phonological factors (formality, exposure to target language and English proficiency) on it. Although the issue of relationship between perception and production has been a hot topic, the relevant studies on consonant clusters are mostly conducted from the perspective of production; few researches take perception into consideration.Considering the difficulties for Chinese EFL learners to acquire English pronunciation and the scarcity of relevant researches, this study looks at the perspectives of both perception and production in Chinese EFL learners'acquisition of consonant clusters. Based on the theory of Error Analysis, the study aims to classify the error types Chinese EFL learners make and discuss the essential causes for the errors, so as to have a deeper understanding of the internal rules of pronunciation acquisition. At the same time, the relationship between perception and production and the correlation between learners'overall pronunciation proficiency and perception / production of consonant clusters are explored. The research questions include: (1) What is the distribution of error types committed by Chinese EFL learners in perception of initial consonant cluster? (2) What is the distribution of error types committed by Chinese EFL learners in production of initial consonant cluster? (3) What is the relationship between learners'perception and production of initial consonant cluster? (4) What are the causes for these errors? (5) What is the relationship between learners'overall pronunciation proficiency and their perception / production of consonant cluster?Two classes (altogether 44 students) of a university in Jiangsu Province are recruited as participants. The experiment material, /Cl/ and /Cr/ clusters, are chosen as the target consonant clusters, with 19 combinations, each of which appears twice. There are two experiments in this study: the perception of the selected words (consonant cluster and distracters), and the production of the consonant clusters. Findings of the study are as follows: (1) Chinese EFL learners are likely to make errors of epenthesis, deletion and substitution in perception of initial consonant cluster. (2) In production of consonant cluster, apart from the abovementioned three errors, participants tend to make errors such as prolonging the /@/ or /W/, aspiration after /@/, and comprehensive errors with epenthesis and aspirated errors. (3) The Pearson test shows that the correlation between perception and production is not statistically significant. However, by making comparisons of participants'performances in perception and production, it is found that errors they make share some similarities, which, to some extent, seems to indicate that correlation does exist between the two. (4) The causes for the main error types in perception and production (epenthesis, deletion and substitution) can be attributed to the negative native language transfer, sonority, markedness respectively. (5) No marked correlation is found between participants'overall pronunciation proficiency and their perception / production of consonant clusters. Moreover, there is no significant difference among the High Group (HG), Average Group (AG), and Low Group (LG).