A Corpus-based Survey Of Epentheses By Chinese College Learners Of English

It is widely acknowledged that pronunciation plays a major role in our personal and social lives.On the one hand,at the affective level it is through the ways we speak,and above all,by means of our accent,we project our regional,social and ethnic identities.On the other hand,pronunciation is also a major factor in our intelligibility to the listeners.It is especially the case when the listener involved is non-native who tends to use acoustic signal rather than applying other methods,such as turning to contextual cues,to resolve ambiguity.So,pronunciation plays a vital role in successful communication.One of the main problems for L2 learners,however,is that pronunciation tends to operate at a subconscious level and so is often not amenable to manipulation.Epenthesis,the insertion of a sound,usually a vowel,typically a schwa,after the consonant,is one of the frequently perceived pronunciation errors in English classes and in the conversation of Chinese college learners of English.This error often prevents the learners from communicating smoothly.In order to make this situation changed,it is necessary to carry out scientific research into Chinese college learners' L2 speech.The present research is designed to examine epentheses by the Chinese College learners of English in their CET-4 and CET-6 oral tests.It employs College Learners' Spoken English Corpus(COLSEC) as the source of data to conduct the research in the following aspects:(1) Searching for distribution features of epentheses within different syllable positions.(2) Making out distribution frequency of epentheses among different phonemes.(3) Finding out high frequency epenthetic segments after some consonants and vowels. (4) Investigating influences of place of articulation and manner of articulation on frequencies of epentheses.(5) Exploring factors operating behind college English learners' interlanguage epentheses.The findings of the research can be summarized as follows.Epentheses distribute unequally within the unit of a syllable.Codas are the most frequently epenthesized position,and the next is the peak,and onsets receive the least amount of epenthesis. As far as the phonemes are concerned,the central vowel /(?)/ receive the most epentheses,followed by the back vowels and the front vowels.The diphthong/I(?)/ causes more insertions than the others.The consonants /d/,/t/,/k/ and /l/ are most frequently followed by an insertion in consonants.As for the epenthetic segments, epenthetic vowels account for 59.3 percent of epenthetic segments,which is 18.6 more than epenthetic consonants.When it comes to place and manner of articulation, more than 70 percent of consonant epentheses happen to alveolar while plosives hold three quarters of the total amount of epentheses after consonants.In term of aspiration, contrary tendencies are captured as speakers tend to epenthesize voiceless onset consonants while epenthesizing voiced coda consonants.Chinese and English are different in their syllable structures.Chinese syllable structure is more restricted than English syllables in that Chinese does not allow consonant clusters in onsets and codas,and that only three consonants /n/,/(?)/ and /r/ can appear in codas.In second language acquisition,codas rather than onsets provide the most difficulty for learners.The two points together explain why learners epenthesize codas most frequently.In English,it is possible to have sequences of up to three consonants in syllable initial position and four in final position.When acquiring the marked English structures,Chinese learners subconsciously turn to epenthesis to make their interlanguage conform to their L1 structure.The total number of the epenthetic schwa is 1891 after consonants /b/,/p/,/m/. /f/,/d/,/t/,/n/,/l/,/g/ and /k/ which accounts for more than sixty percent of 2871 cases of epenthesis after consonants.These consonants /b/,/p/,/m/,/f /,/d/,/t/,/n/,/l/,/g/ and /k/ also exist in Chinese sound system.The corresponding Pin Yin letters are b,p, m,f,d,n,l,g and k whose pronunciation sounds like /b(?)/,/p(?)/,/m(?)/,/f(?)/,/d(?)/,/t(?)/,/n(?)/,/l(?)/, /g(?)/ and /k(?)/ respectively.L1 transfer and voice quality settings account for high frequency of epenthetic segment /(?)/ after these consonants.In COLSEC,epenthesis after vowels happens 1420 times,after 829 of which/r/ is inserted.The insertion of the /r/ after some vowels is acceptable and this phenomenon occurs widely in English native speakers' casual speech.Sometimes the epenthesized /r/ is perceived after /(?):/and/(?):/.However,they are not as popular as epenthesis after /(?)/.Epenthesis after vowels is an aspect of interlanguage process through which the learners' interlanguage approaches the target language. Finally,appearance frequency of some phonemes in English,to some extent,can explain the learners' frequency of deviations from the target language.The most frequently epenthesized segment is the schwa,the middle vowel /(?)/. The segment is unmarked and tends to be subject to contextual coloring.The pronunciation of the schwa occupies the shortest time and its pronunciation is flexible and often changes with its phonological surroundings.In other words,it can easily blend in with its neighbors.The present study sheds light on the features of epenthesis by Chinese college English learners and explores the factors operating behind the phenomenon.It has implications on what to instruct and how to instruct in teaching English pronunciation. Furthermore,it can help establish a corpus-based approach that can be extended to the studies of other pronunciation errors.