On interdental fricatives in the first-layer dialects of Maghrebi Arabic

The present paper aims at revisiting the question of interdental fricatives in the so-called pre-Hilali Arabic dialects, that is the descendants of the first stage of Arabicization in North Africa. It attempts to challenge, from a diachronic and comparative approach, the view that the absence of interdental fricatives—and their merger with dental stops—is a hallmark of pre-Hilali Arabic. On the basis of neglected data, we will provide evidence suggesting that interdental phonemes occur or did occur in some of the Arabic dialects which resulted from the early Muslim conquest of North Africa.

THE PRODUCTION OF ENGLISH CONSONANTS /θ/ AND /ð/ BY ENGLISH DEPARTMENT STUDENTS

Indonesians have been taking much concern in English since it has been applied in formal education curricula. Also, not all Indonesians are familiar with English pronunciation, especially its characteristics in phonemes. Some English consonants even do not exist in Indonesian consonants such as the sounds /θ/ and /ð/ categorized as voiceless and voiced interdental fricatives. Due to this concern, this study investigates the production of English voiced and voiceless interdental consonants uttered by English Department students as non-native speakers of English using the Praat application. There were eight undergraduate first-year English major students as the respondents. The researcher gave them eighteen words consisting of /θ/ and /ð/ sounds in initial, medial, and final word-position. The data are in audio recordings. The result revealed that most students changed the voiced interdental fricative into consonants such as /d/ and /t/. This inappropriate way also happened when they produced voiceless interdental fricatives. They changed /θ/ sound into consonant sounds such as /d/ and /t/.

Translanguaging patterns in everyday urban conversations in Cameroon

This study analyses the translanguaging patterns of urban Cameroonians’ linguistic choices (e.g. lexical or phonological) in everyday conversations in Cameroon. Using observation and audio-recordings of 20 naturally occurring conversations as data, a descriptive corpus-based methodology was adopted for analysis. The quantitative approach utilises AntConc (Version 3.5.8) with descriptive analytical tools to identify the speakers’ idiolectal choices in meaning-making translanguaging patterns. The results revealed salient patterns of the speakers’ deployed lexical, grammatical, morphological, phonological and syntactical forms as an integrated system of language. It revealed the speakers preference for polysemous words (e.g. repe) over less polysemous words (e.g. father); choice for shorter lexical words (e.g. man) over longer words (e.g. manpikin); a preference for specialised gender-neutral markers (e.g. ih, which refers to both male and female) over gender-specific forms (e.g. he/she); a preference for voiceless interdental fricatives (e.g. dem, dey) over voiced interdental fricatives (e.g. them, they) and where the choice of inflectional morpheme expressing tense (e.g. ed) is one that can either be omitted or added to a word, the presence of this inflectional morpheme is sometimes fairly used. Such results have practical implications for understanding peoples’ language use as a translanguaging act in bi/multilingual contexts.

CAN AUDIO-VISUAL TRAINING EQUALLY AFFECT PHONEMIC AND PHONETIC CONTRASTS? AN EXAMPLE OF L2 FRICATIVE PRODUCTION

The paper explores the effect of audio-visual perceptual training on Serbian EFL learners’ production of novel phonemic and phonetic contrasts in L2, specifically focused on fricatives. Hence, the paper aims at discovering whether audio-visual training has equal effects at phonemic and phonetic levels, and also, whether the effect is the same at two different age/proficiency levels, 6th grade primary and 4th grade secondary school. In order to explore the phonemic level we concentrated on interdental fricatives, and for the phonetic level differences sibilant contrasts were included, following the predictions of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best 1994) and Speech Learning Model (Flege 1995). The testing for relevant acoustic information was per- formed prior to and immediately following the experimental period, when all the participants were recorded pronouncing a prepared sentence list containing target sounds. It consisted of measuring spectral moments, frication duration and comparison of spectrograms. The results of the audio-visual phonetic training proved especially beneficial for phonemic contrasts, i.e. interdental fricatives for both levels of age/proficiency, while sibilant contrasts showed insignificant progress. The age/proficiency level did not appear to be a significant predictor of the effect of audio-visual training. Along with the empirical results, the paper likewise presents pedagogical implications important for pronunciation teaching and highlights the significance of phonetic training in the Serbian EFL context in particular.

English Fricative Rendition of Educated Speakers of English from a North-Central City of Nigeria

This paper examines the influence of ethnicity on the realization of the English fricatives articulated by selected educated speakers of English from four ethnic groups of Ebira, Igala, Hausa and Okun-Yoruba residing in Lokoja, a North-Central city of Nigeria. Data for the study consist of 1080 tokens elicited from 120 informants. Guided by a synthesis of the theoretical frameworks of Honey’s (1997) Sociophonology and Azevedo’s (1981) Contrastive Phonology, perceptual and acoustic analyses of the data reveal that, although speakers have a tendency to not articulate sounds absent in their phonemic inventory with the dexterity expected of their level of education, co-habitation seems a factor that has robbed off on the speakers’ level of performance in this study: 80% overcame their linguistic challenges to correctly articulate the test items while 30% generally found it difficult to articulate the interdental fricatives /P/ and /D/ and the voiced palato-alveolar fricative /Z/; perhaps, because these sounds are absent in their respective phonemic inventories. The paper submits additionally that, phonology is still resistant to input (cf. Fajobi, 2013), level of education notwithstanding. However, positive social relations could impact positively on language use and competence in any pluralinguistic English as a second language (ESL) environment.

Patterns of Pronunciation of English Interdental Fricatives by Some Yoruba Speakers of English in a Nigerian University

This paper is an investigation of the pronunciation patterns of English interdental fricatives by some Yoruba speakers of English at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife. This was with a view to finding out the extent to which gender, the level of education, and the position in words of the interdental fricatives (i.e., the (th) variable as in think, pathetic, and path on the one hand, and the (dh) variable as in then, father, and clothe on the other hand) could affect the realisations of these two fricatives, otherwise known as (th) and (dh) variables. Data eventually used for this study were drawn from the reading performance of thirty-three informants who were of Yoruba origin. The thirty-three informants comprised 20 male and 13 female subjects with different levels of education ranging from undergraduate to doctoral. Our findings indicated that the (dh) variable was significantly affected by gender while the (th) variable was not. It was also demonstrated that while the (th) was significantly affected by the level of education of informants, the (dh) variable had no statistically significant association with the speakers’ level of education. Finally, the results of the study revealed that the position in a word (whether initial, medial, or final) of each of the variables affected the realisations of the two variables significantly. It was therefore concluded that sociolinguistic variables such as gender and the level of education were capable of affecting the rendition of linguistic variables significantly.

From interference to transfer in language contact: Variation in voice onset time

This study examines cross-generational differences in the realization of an English phonological contrast by bilingual Polish Americans in New York City. I analyze the production of voice onset time (VOT) in underlying stops, as intinandden, and stops derived from interdental fricatives, as in [t]in forthinand [d]en forthen, in an English-only reading task. Generation one exhibits VOT “interference” for both stop types, with a bias toward interference for voiced stops. Generation two “transfers” Polish-like VOTs to derived stops. I argue that the cross-generational progression from theglobaleffects of interference to thefocusedpresence of transfer is filtered through L1 markedness and reflects speakers' growing sensitivity to L2 phonology and social considerations. The observed asymmetries in the distribution of interference/transfer are unaccountable by existing models of L2 acquisition and motivate a view of L1/L2 phonetic categories as governed by a variable grammar with access to phonological and social information.

Voicing of Initial Interdental Fricatives in Early Middle English Function Words

In Modern English, function words such as this, that, and the are pronounced with a voiced onset, while content words have the original voiceless onset. A statistical analysis of the distribution of <ð> and <þ> in Vices and Virtues, a text preserved in London, British Library, Stowe MS 34 (circa 1200), reveals a distribution, whose most plausible interpretation is that these two letters were used to encode stress-conditioned differences in voicing. This sets the voicing of function words, normally dated to the fourteenth century, back to circa 1200 or earlier.*