ONeal2015a

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ONeal2015a
BibType ARTICLE
Key ONeal2015a
Author(s) George O’Neal
Title Segmental repair and interactional intelligibility: The relationship between consonant deletion, consonant insertion, and pronunciation intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca in Japan
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Conversation Analysis, Intelligibility, ELF, Consonant deletion, Consonant insertion, Segmental repair, Japanese
Publisher
Year 2015
Language
City
Month
Journal Journal of Pragmatics
Volume 85
Number
Pages 122–134
URL Link
DOI 10.1016/j.pragma.2015.06.013
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

This is a qualitative study of the relationship between consonant deletion, consonant insertion, and the pragmatic strategies that maintain mutual intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca (hereafter, ELF) interactions among university and exchange students at a Japanese university (Jenkins, 2000; Matsumoto, 2011; O’Neal, 2015). Some ELF research claims that consonant deletion attenuates mutual intelligibility in ELF interactions, especially if the consonant deletion occurs in word-initial and word-medial consonant clusters or in consonant clusters in syllable onsets and codas (Jenkins, 2000, 2007; Deterding, 2013). This study assesses the effect of consonant deletion and consonant insertion on the utual intelligibility of pronunciation in ELF interactions in Japan. Using conversation analytic methodology to examine a corpus of miscommunications among ELF speakers at a Japanese university, within which miscommunications are defined as repair sequences, this study claims that consonant deletion can attenuate mutual intelligibility, and that the insertion of a deleted consonant into a word can help restore mutual intelligibility. Furthermore, this is true regardless of deviance from or approximation to a native speaker pronunciation standard. This study concludes that segmental repair is an effective strategy with which English speakers can maintain mutual intelligibility.

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