| Home |

Volume 4
August 2009
Article 6.

Formats
PDF

Title
Segmental analysis of speech intelligibility problems among Sudanese listeners of English

Author
Ezzeldin Mahmoud Tajeldin Ali and Vincent J. van Heuven.


Biodata
- Ezzeldin Mahmoud Tajeldin Ali, Ph.d candidate - Dept. of Experimental Linguistics and Phonetics - Leiden University, The Netherlands.
- A language lecturer, Dept of English - Gadarif University - Eastern Sudan
- Areas of interest English phonetics and phonology, contrastive linguistics.
- A member of EFL syllabus design committee, at Faculty of Education, Gedarif University.

Vincent J. van Heuven is professor of Experimental Linguistics and Phonetics at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, and former director of the institute. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, secretary of the Permanent Council of the IPA, and associate editor of Phonetica.

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the problems of speech intelligibility of Sudanese university learners of English. The whole work was done on the basis of segmental analysis of vowels, consonants, and consonant clusters of English so as to explore the types of perception errors made in the areas under concern. Ten Sudanese learners of English (both male and female)  were selected for the experiments. The subjects were asked to listen to four lists of words that include vowels, single and cluster consonants which work in an integrative way, and a  list of  SPIN sentences (SPIN = Speech Perception in Noise test, developed by Kalikov, Stevens and Elliot, 1977). The single-item stimuli were constructed on the basis of the Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) but with a few potential improvements. It is less time consuming as the number of the stimuli is reduced. Moreover, the MRT provides reliable results even with small groups of 10 to 20. The obtained information can be analyzed by confusion matrices that will in turn show how different phonemes are misidentified. Thus, the MRT helps localize the learning difficulties.
Errors were committed by Sudanese listeners at vowel, consonant, and cluster levels, in addition to SPIN sentences. But more errors were made in the perception of vowels, coda consonants, clusters of English, and SPIN sentences.  English vowels proved to be the most difficult area of perception to the listeners, more so than the single and cluster consonants because the students are not familiar with a large number of vowels. Listeners use their L1 perceptual strategies, and  fall back on L1 inventory when L2 knowledge is lacking.

KEY WORDS: perception error, perceptual strategies, confusion, segmental analysis,  misidentification, L1 effect, L2 counterpart, substitution, enhance, hindrance, wrong implementation, communication breakdown,  phonemic awareness, acoustic cues, phonemic inventory, basic sound knowledge, speech intelligibility.