VARIATION IN PALATO-ALVEOLAR FRICATIVES OF UNDERGRADUATES’ SPOKEN ENGLISH

Authors: Demola Jolayemi & Mosunmola Oluyinka Adebayo

ABSTRACT

The students of the University of Africa, Nigeria, seemingly, have allophonic variations of palato-alveolar voiceless and voiced fricatives (/ʃ/ and /Ʒ/), during the articulation of some English words. The study investigates these variants of the palate-alveolar fricatives, using 20 male and 20 female student-respondents. The linear regression was deployed to analyse the only null hypothesis. Also, the praat software Version 6.1.52, was used for the acoustic analysis of the collected speech sounds. The result reveals that the students articulate the voiced palato-alveolar fricative (/ʒ/) with a variant of /ʃ/ at the word medial position, and rejected the hypothesis on gender differentiation. The study suggests that phonemic interchange should be recognised as a variant of the /ʒ/ among the second users of English. Since the use is phonetic and not phonemic, the physical realisation of the underlying phoneme /ʒ/ should be a codification of an emergent realisation in the L2 phonological repertoire of the interchange of palato-alveolar fricatives.

Keywords: Free variation, Palatal Alveolar Fricatives, Gender, Pronunciation, praat

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