Language Learning 51:4, December 2001, pp. 681–718
Syllable Simplification Strategies:
A Stylistic Perspective
Yuh-Huey Lin
Chung Hua University
This study suggests another perspective in viewing the
effect of style on English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
learners’ errors. It is generally assumed that greater accuracy is obtained by second language (L2) learners as style
becomes more formal (Tarone, 1983). Although this “formal
equals accurate” axiom correctly predicted L2 learners’
production of singleton consonants (e.g., Dickerson &
Dickerson, 1977; R. Schmidt, 1987), however, it did not hold
true for their pronunciation of more complex structures
such as consonant clusters (Major, 1994; Weinberger, 1987).
I hypothesize that for consonant clusters, what varies in
accordance with style is the learners’ choice of syllable
simplification strategies rather than their error rates. The
production of English onset consonant clusters by 20 Chinese adult EFL learners in four types of tasks confirmed
This is a revised and expanded version of a paper presented at the 1999
Annual Conference of Canadian Linguistic Association (CLA), Sherbrooke,
Canada (June 4, 1999).
I am grateful to Feng-Fu Tsao, Hsu Samuel Wang, and Sai-Hua Kuo for
their valuable comments on an early version of this article; John Hamilton,
who patiently recorded and helped check the probability of the pseudowords;
and Rachel Wu for her help in the transcription of the data. Thanks also go
to Liang Chiao Hsu and his students at Chung Hua University for their
enthusiastic participation in the experiment. I am also grateful to the editors,
especially Nick Ellis, for their encouragement and useful suggestions and
advice. The article has benefited a great deal from the anonymous reviewers’,
Fred Eckman’s, and Niclas Abrahamsson’s insightful comments and suggestions, for which I express my deepest gratitude.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Yuh-Huey
Lin, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Chung Hua University, Hsin Chu, Taiwan, R.O.C. Internet: [email protected]
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this prediction: The use of epenthesis increased as the style
of the task became more formal, and the percentage of
deletions and replacements became higher in less formal
tasks.
One of the most frequently studied areas in English as a
Foreign Language (EFL) syllable structures is the acquisition of
English consonant clusters. As predicted by the Contrastive
Analysis Hypothesis (CAH; Lado, 1957), native speakers of
languages without consonant clusters may have some difficulty in
pronouncing target items that contain such sequences. Not all
combinations that are absent in the learners’ native language,
however, cause the same degree of difficulty. For example,
consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant (CVCC) syllables were
found to be more difficult than CVC syllables (Eckman, 1991;
Weinberger, 1987), and the error rates of EFL learners’ production
of clusters like /pj/ and /fj/ were generally lower than those for /pl/
and /gl/ (e.g., Broselow & Finer, 1991). The notion of “universal
markedness” and “sonority distance” and a number of hypotheses
have been proposed in the literature to account for such phenomena, namely, the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (Eckman,
1977), the Structural Conformity Hypothesis (Eckman, 1991), the
Typological Markedness Hypothesis (Eckman & Iverson, 1993),
and the Minimal Sonority Distance Hypothesis (Broselow & Finer,
1991).
Whereas the above hypotheses concerned the error rates of
EFL learners’ pronunciation of consonant clusters, other studies
investigated the factors conditioning the error types or strategies
utilized by the learners to resolve such production difficulties
(Benson, 1988; Carlisle, 1991; Lin, 1999, 2001a; Tarone, 1980;
Weinberger, 1987; Wolfram, 1985). Generally, learners’ choice of
syllable simplification strategies was accounted for in terms of
(a) the universal preference for open syllables: the effect of adjacent
sounds, (b) native language transfer: preference for disyllabicity, and
(c) recoverability of linguistic context.
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As can be noted, most studies on second language (L2) consonant clusters mentioned above are concerned with intralinguistic effects on EFL students’ error rates or error types. Although a
number of efforts have been made to probe the influence of sociolinguistic or stylistic factors conditioning the error rates of EFL
learners’ production of singleton segments, only two studies on
consonant clusters are found that investigated such extralinguistic effects on L2 error rates (Major, 1994; Weinberger, 1987). It is
interesting that the results of both Major’s (1994) and Weinberger’s (1987) study do not conform to the assumption that holds
true for almost all the studies on singleton consonants, that is, that
greater accuracy or less (native language) transfer is obtained as
style becomes more formal or as more attention is paid to the form
rather than to content (Dickerson, 1975; Dickerson & Dickerson,
1977; Gatbonton, 1975, 1978; Nemser, 1971; Preston, 1989; Sato,
1984, 1985; R. Schmidt, 1977, 1987; Tarone, 1979, 1982, 1983, 1988;
Wenk, 1979).
I suggest that L2 error rates should not be the only concern
in interlanguage studies. The types of errors or the strategies
utilized by learners when encountering production difficulties
may also have some significance or offer some insights in L2
acquisition research. I hypothesize that for consonant clusters,
what varies in accordance with the styles or the formality of the
elicitation tasks is the learners’ choice of syllable simplification
strategies rather than their error rates. As also mentioned by
Carlisle (1994), Major (1987) suggested that epenthesis would be
used in more formal styles, and from a functional point of view,
Weinberger (1987, 1994) posited that the proportion of epenthesis
to deletion would decrease in texts like reading passages or speaking, where the interlocutor can recover or repair what has been
lost through deletion from the linguistic contexts. I thus predicted
that for situations that are more formal or that require more
attention to form than to content, in order to make the target
consonants audible, the use of epenthesis will increase as a result
of hypercorrection. In contrast, as tasks become less formal or as
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more attention is paid to content rather than to form, more
instances of deletion and replacement will be induced.
An experiment was designed to test this hypothesis. Before
presenting the investigation, I first briefly review the related
literature, which provides the background rationale for the present study.
Syllable Simplification Strategies
It is assumed that the consonant-vowel (CV) syllable is the
least marked or the optimal syllable (Carlisle, 1994; Hooper, 1976;
Jakobson & Halle, 1956). In general, EFL learners adopt two
strategies, namely, vowel epenthesis or consonant deletion, to
break up the more complex, or more marked, CVC(C) or CCV, to
the least marked CV structure. Usually, the vowel being inserted
is the schwa /ə/, and in most cases, it is the second consonant that
is deleted from a CC sequence (Lin, 2001b), a phenomenon also
observed from errors made by native speakers of English (Ingram,
1995; Kupin, 1982; Stemberger & Treiman, 1986) and loanword
phonology (Yip, 1993). The following sets of examples display how
EFL learners utilize these two syllable simplification strategies in
their attempt to pronounce the target English items that contain
word-final obstruents or consonant clusters:
(1)
Epenthesis
a. cat /kæt/ → /kætə/
b. cast /kæst/ → /kæstə/
c.
class /klæs/ → /kəlæs/
(2)
Deletion
a. cat /kæt/ → /kæ/
b. cast /kæst/ → /kæs/
c.
class /klæs/ → /kæs/
There is another type of error concerning onset consonant
clusters: replacement of one of the consonants, which, though it
does not alter the syllable structure, appears quite frequently
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among EFL learners (Broselow & Finer, 1991; Lin, 2001b). As in
the case of deletion, it is mostly the second, rather than the first,
consonant that is replaced. In Lin’s (2001b) study on Chinese
speakers’ acquisition of English word-initial consonant clusters,
for example, in 123 of the 138 cases of consonant replacement, the
second consonant was replaced, whereas in only 15 cases was the
initial consonant replaced. Examples in (3) illustrate errors of this
type:
(3)
Replacement
a. flee /fli/ → /fri/
b. play /pley/ → /pwey/
Preference for Open Syllables
Many attempts have been made to determine the factors
conditioning EFL learners’ choice between the strategies of
epenthesis and deletion. It has generally been found that epenthesis occurred more frequently word-initially, whereas deletion
was more likely to occur word-finally (Anderson, 1987; HancinBhatt & Bhatt, 1997; Tarone, 1976, 1980). Some studies have
attributed the learners’ choice of the strategies to the effect of
universal preference for open syllables (Benson, 1988; Carlisle,
1991; Tarone, 1980; Wolfram, 1985). For instance, it was found in
Wolfram’s (1985) study that final clusters were simplified more
frequently when followed by a consonant than when followed by
a vowel. And as also indicated in Carlisle (1991, p. 78), the results
of Tarone’s (1980) study examining vowel epenthesis to word-final
singleton consonants (VC → VCV) revealed that of the 45 instances of vowel epenthesis, more than 50% occurred before a
pause, 40% occurred before a word-initial consonant, and less than
5% occurred before a word-initial vowel. The reason for the asymmetry is that when followed by an onsetless word, the word-final
consonant can be resyllabified with the initial vowel of the second
word to form a CV. On the other hand, if the following word starts
with a consonant, it needs another vowel to form a CV.
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Native Language Transfer: Chinese Preference for Disyllabicity
Other studies concerning the choice of syllable simplification
strategies have presumed the effect of native language transfer
(Broselow, Chen, & Wang, 1998; Heyer, 1986; Lin, 1999, 2001a;
Tarone, 1980; Wang, 1995). For example, in Wang’s (1995) study on
the acquisition of English word-final obstruents by Chinese speakers, which was further elaborated by Broselow et al. (1998) within
the constraint-based optimality theory framework, the students
exhibited considerable preference for disyllabic forms, that is,
epenthesis applied significantly more often to monosyllabic than
to disyllabic words (72% vs. 17.5%), producing disyllabic outputs.
And in Lin’s (2001a) study on production of word-initial consonant
clusters in CVC, CCVC, and CCVCV structures, strategies that
resulted in disyllabic forms were significantly more frequently
used than those resulting in mono- or trisyllabic outputs. Both
studies regarded this preference for disyllabicity of the Chinese
speakers as a transfer from their native language, Mandarin
Chinese, which favors disyllabic words.
Recoverability of Linguistic Context
In Weinberger’s (1987) study on L2 word-final consonants
and consonant clusters (which I will discuss in more detail in the
next section), participants were found to utilize epenthesis more
frequently than deletion in tasks without linguistic context. This
finding confirmed part (iii) of his Syllable Simplification Strategy
Hypothesis, which states: “The proportion %epenthesis/%deletion
should be greater in tasks without linguistic context than in tasks
with linguistic context” (p. 408). In tasks that supplied linguistic
context, that is, paragraph reading and storytelling, the proportion
of epenthesis to deletion was 9.3/12.6 = .74, whereas in list reading,
where no linguistic context was available, the proportion was
11.3/5.5 = 2.0. Weinberger accounted for the lower rates of deletion
in the list-reading task in terms of the notion of “recoverability.”
Since the list-reading task did not supply linguistic context, there
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was a high potential of ambiguity, and the “avoid ambiguity
constraint” thus resulted in a reduced rate of deletion.
Sociolinguistic or Stylistic Studies on L2 Consonant Clusters
As indicated by Tarone (1979, 1983) and Beebe (1980), interlanguage, which is essentially like a natural language (Adjemian,
1976; Tarone, 1979), displays the same type of style shifting as is
found in native language research (Fischer, 1958; Labov, 1963,
1969, 1972; Trudgill, 1974, 1983). Studies in the past 2 decades on
L2 performance and styles have generally supported this view
(syntax: Felix, 1980; LoCoco, 1976; M. Schmidt, 1980; morphology:
Larsen-Freeman, 1975; phonology: Dickerson, 1975; Dickerson &
Dickerson, 1977; Gatbonton, 1975, 1978; Nemser, 1971; Preston,
1989; Sato, 1984, 1985; R. Schmidt, 1977, 1987; Tarone, 1979, 1982,
1983, 1988; Wenk, 1979). Generally, it was found that, like native
language speakers, L2 learners achieved greater accuracy or produced more native-like outputs as the style became more formal
or as more attention was paid to the form rather than to the
content. For example, in Dickerson and Dickerson’s (1977) study,
Japanese EFL speakers pronounced English /r/ almost 100%
accurately in word lists but only about 50% accurately in free
speech.
A closer examination of the studies on L2 phonology, however,
revealed that, although the “formal equals accurate” axiom correctly predicted L2 learners’ production of single segments like the
English /r/, it did not hold true for their pronunciation of more
complex structures such as consonant clusters. Results of both
Major’s (1994) and Weinberger’s (1987) studies, which are, to the
best of my knowledge, the only two studies on EFL consonant
clusters and styles, did not conform to the pattern predicted by
this axiom.
Major (1994) compared the production of English word-initial
and final consonant clusters by 4 Brazilian EFL learners in two
styles: the more formal “reading a word list” and the less formal
“reading a text.” The results, though supporting his Ontogeny
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Model, contradicted the stylistic prediction: There were significantly more target-like occurrences in the text than in the word
list (p < .05). Major proposed two explanations for this contradiction. First, the text reading task provided environments that
would induce more target-like production; that is, when vowels
precede or follow the consonant clusters, the word can resyllabify,
breaking up the consonant cluster (CC$V → C$CV, V$CC → VC$C,
illustrated by the sky /ðə$skay/ → /ðəs$kay/). Second, “the formality between reading a word list and text is not great enough to
produce large differences” (p. 671).
In accounting for EFL learners’ production of English wordfinal consonants and consonant clusters, Weinberger (1987) posited the Syllable Simplification Strategy Hypothesis in regard to
three variables: (a) degree of structural markedness of final consonant clusters, (b) task formality, and (c) linguistic context. The
hypothesis was stated as follows:
(4)
Syllable Simplification Strategy Hypothesis (p. 408)
(i) The degree of overall syllable simplification will
increase as the final consonant cluster increases.
(ii) The degree of overall syllable simplification will
increase as the task formality decreases.
(iii) The proportion %epenthesis / %deletion should be
greater in tasks without linguistic context than in
tasks with linguistic context.
To test the hypothesis, Weinberger conducted an experiment
that elicited four Chinese speakers’ production of word-final consonants and consonant clusters (C#, CC#, CCC#) in three tasks
varying in degrees of formality: list reading (most formal) → paragraph reading → storytelling (least formal). Results confirmed
parts (i) and (iii) (which I have illustrated in the previous section)
but not part (ii) of the hypothesis. Overall, simplification was
16.8% for the list task, 23.8% for the paragraph task, and 19.8%
for storytelling. Again, in accordance with the findings in Major’s
(1994) study, task formality did not guarantee production accuracy. Weinberger attributed the reduction of the error rates in
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storytelling to the speakers’ avoidance of difficult structures: “In
view of the fact that the subjects seem to be avoiding difficult
consonant clusters, they are not producing words that contain
them, and consequently their error rates are relatively reduced”
(p. 411).
Problems of Previous Studies
Some problems can be readily observed from the above review of previous studies. First, studies on the relation between
styles and L2 syllable structures are quite rare. Second, the results
of both studies (Major, 1994, and Weinberger, 1987) on EFL errors
contradicted the general assumption that more accuracy should
be obtained as style becomes more formal, which has held true in
most studies on singleton consonants.
Both Major and Weinberger have provided explanations for
such inconsistency. Major accounted for the unexpected results by
claiming that the degree of formality between the two
tasks—reading word list and text—is not great enough to cause
large differences. Even if there was no formality difference between the two tasks, however, we might expect only “no significant
difference” between the students’ error rates in these two styles,
but not “significantly (p < 0.05) more target-like occurrences in the
text than in the word list” (p. 670).
As for Weinberger’s (1987) “avoidance of difficult consonant
clusters” account for the low simplification rate in the storytelling
task, although it might be true that L2 speakers tend to avoid
difficult structures in free speech, what is affected by this avoidance strategy should be the number of words containing consonant
clusters rather than the rate of errors in those few cluster words
that did in fact occur.
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Methods
Hypotheses
In view of the above problems, I thus designed a more
comprehensive experiment to investigate the influence of task
formality on L2 learners’ choice of syllable simplification strategies in their attempt to pronounce English consonant clusters. The
consonant clusters studied were those that appear in the wordinitial position. The experiment featured (a) a larger number of
participants (as compared with previous studies), (b) a wider
variety of task types, ranging from the most formal “reading of
minimal pairs” to “word list reading” and “sentence reading” to the
least formal “conversation,” and (c) consideration of more types of
strategies, including replacement other than epenthesis and
deletion.
The prediction is that for consonant clusters, what varies in
accordance with the degrees of task formality is the learners’
choice of simplification strategies rather than their error rates. For
tasks that are more formal or that require more attention to form
or pronunciation rather than to content, the use of epenthesis will
increase as a result of hypercorrection. On the other hand, as tasks
become less formal or as more attention is paid to content rather
than to form, more instances of deletion and replacement will be
induced.
Participants
Participants in this study were 20 students (10 males and
10 females) enrolled in the summer program at the night school
of the Industrial Management Department, Chung Hua University, Taiwan, Republic of China. They were all native bilingual
speakers of both Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese, which are the
two most prominent languages in Taiwan. Their ages ranged from
21 to 35, and they all began studying English in junior high school
at the age of 13 or 14. They obtained roughly similar scores on the
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Michigan Listening Comprehension Test (the scores ranged from
42 to 66, and the average was 51.17). They were thus believed to
represent the average EFL learners in Taiwan. (See Appendix A
for a more detailed description of each student.)
Items
English syllables allow at most three consonants in the
word-initial, or onset (e.g., spring), and four in the word-final, or
coda, position (e.g., sixths /ksθs/). Since all the onset threeconsonant clusters (#CCC) start with /s/-Stop, however, and
since the /s/-Stop sequence (e.g., /st/, /sp/, /sk/) has been viewed by
many as having a different structure from that of “true onset
clusters” in English (Fudge, 1969; Selkirk, 1982; Ewen, 1982;
Stemberger, 1986), only the two-consonant onset clusters (#CC),
except those consisting of /s/ followed by a stop, were considered
in the study.
Possible combinations of consonants in English word-initial
onsets are listed in Table 1, with the initial consonant (C1) depicted along the vertical axis and the second consonant (C2) along
the horizontal, which yields the 27 clusters, as shown in (5):
(5)
English Onset Cluster Types:
a. Stop-Glide: pj, kj, kw,1 tw, bj, dw
b. Stop-Liquid: pr, tr, kr, pl, kl, br, dr, gr, bl, gl
c.
Fricative-Glide: fj, vj, sw
d. Fricative-Liquid: fl, fr, θr, ʃr, sl
e.
Fricative-Nasal: sm, sn
f.
Nasal-Glide:2 mj
In order to avoid frequency effect and to obtain enough
items available for the minimal pair reading task, pseudowords
were included in the study in addition to real English words.
For each cluster (except for /θr/ and /ʃr/, since most Chinese
speakers have difficulty even with the single consonants /θ/ and
/ʃ/), one pseudoword was designed with a definition (e.g., dwek:
a kind of flower). Because number of syllables was also a factor
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Table 1
Possible Consonant Combinations in English Onsets
Glide
Liquid
Nasal
Stop
w
j
r
l
m
n
p
t
k
Stop
p
t
k
b
d
g
–
+
+
–
+
–
+
–
+
+
–
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
–
+
+
–
+
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Fricative
f
v
θ
ʃ
s
–
–
+
–
+
+
+
+
–
+
+
–
+
+
–
+
–
–
–
+
–
–
–
–
+
–
–
–
–
+
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Nasal
m
–
+
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
conditioning learners’ choice of the strategies (Broselow et al.,
1998; Lin, 2001a; Wang, 1995), all the items in the three reading
tasks were monosyllabic. Appendix B presents a complete set of
the pseudowords used in the study.
Procedure and Tasks
All 20 students were gathered in a quiet classroom and were
told that instead of being tested, they were going to test the
appropriateness of some teaching materials for students at Chang
Hua University. The purpose of telling them this was to ease their
nerves and rid them of their anxiety, since many of them were quite
afraid of English exams. They were then asked to perform the
following tasks.
Michigan Listening Comprehension Test. The students were
given the Michigan Listening Comprehension Test. The purpose
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was to ensure that the participants’ English proficiency was
roughly equivalent. The test took about 20 min.
Learning the pseudowords. To familiarize the students with
the pseudowords, I prerecorded the pronunciation of the words by
a male native speaker of American English (who was a teacher in
both Chung Hua University and Soochow University). Since the
words were to appear in the sentence reading task, for the purpose
of the study, the students were told that these new words were
low-frequency words and were asked to practice pronouncing
them as they read the word list and listen to the pronunciation.
This took about 15 min. (After the experiment, the students were
apprised of the purpose of the study, as well as the fact that the
new words that they had been learning and using in the tasks were
actually nonsense words.)
The main task. After listening to and practicing pronouncing the pseudowords, the students were then asked to go into
another room one by one for the production task. The task consisted of four subparts, which differed from each other in their
degrees of formality or in the amount of attention they required
for the form or pronunciation of the target items. The four types
of tasks are described in the following, and a complete version of
the tasks is given in Appendix C.
1. Reading minimal pairs with phonetic transcription. Reading minimal pairs is assumed to be the most formal task
(Labov, 1972). Since the study also concerns the amount of
attention the speakers pay to the pronunciation, phonetic
transcriptions were also provided for each word. There were
altogether 20 minimal pairs, that is, 40 items, in three kinds
of combinations, as exemplified in (6):
(6)
a.
b.
c.
real word / real word: flee / free
[fli]/ [fri]
real word / pseudoword: twin / twip
[twin] / [twip]
pseudoword / pseudoword: croot / cloot
[krut] / [klut]
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2. Reading word list. The second task was reading the word
list, which is not as formal a task and requires less attention
to the pronunciation than reading minimal pairs with phonetic
transcriptions. All the pseudowords and some of the real words
that appeared in the minimal pairs were included in this task,
which included 34 items.
3. Sentence reading/grammaticality judgment test. The task
that usually follows word list reading regarding task formality
is paragraph reading. Since the degree of formality between
these two tasks has been questioned (Major, 1994), I therefore
designed another type of task that is more capable of distracting the speakers’ attention from the form or pronunciation of
the target words while forcing them to focus their attention on
the meaning of the content. This sentence-reading task, similar to the one in the study of Hancin-Bhatt and Bhatt (1997),
was disguised in the form of a grammaticality judgment test.
Eleven pairs of sentences were constructed, each of which
consisted of at least one word (pseudo- or real word) beginning
with consonant clusters. All the pseudowords in the previous
two tasks were included, and there were altogether 40 target
items. One of the sentences in each pair violated some English
grammatical rule, such as verb agreement, and the students
were instructed to read the one that they judged to be correct.
The differences between the pair of sentences were underlined. Since the same target words appeared in both sentences,
either choice served equally well for the purpose of the study.
A sample pair of sentences in the task is given in (7). (The
target items are italicized here, but they appeared in plain font
in the version distributed to the students.)
(7)
a.
b.
To sweek on the pute snow is a lot of fun.
To sweek on the pute snow is a lot of funny.
4. Conversation. The least formal type of task is conversation.
Since words with word-initial consonant clusters are rare
compared with those with singleton onsets, they are difficult
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to elicit from free conversations. To solve this problem, I
designed a “controlled conversation” in which students were
to answer the questions asked by the researcher in complete
sentences. For instance, when asked “What’s your favorite
flower?” they were to answer: “My favorite flower is. . . .” The
reason for asking them to respond in this way was to ensure
that they produced the target consonant clusters. Since
pseudowords were not included, only 16 items were obtained
from each student in this task.
Data Gathering and Transcription
The students’ responses were tape-recorded using a lownoise microphone and a SONY 5000 recorder. A total of 2,600
tokens were gathered from the elicitation tasks [(minimal pair 40
+ word list 34 + sentence 40 + conversation 16) × 20 participants
= 2,600 tokens). Since the major concern of the study is the
strategies used by the students, the target items were not transcribed in detailed phonetic notations. Rather, they were labeled
as “-” if correctly pronounced and “E” (Epenthesis), “D” (Deletion),
or “R” (Replacement) when these strategies were utilized. The
classification was performed by a graduate student at the Linguistic Institute of National Tsing Hua University, who is also welltrained in phonetic transcription, and myself. There was a high
percentage (about 95%) of agreement between the two transcribers’ categorizations of the items. When there was disagreement, the tape was replayed until full agreement was reached.
Results
Table 2 displays the overall results.3
Error Rates
Altogether, the students produced 1,206 errors (46.38%). A
series of one-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) was conducted
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Table 2
Percentages of occurrence of epenthesis, deletion, and replacement
in the four types of tasks
Epenthesis
Deletion
Replacement
Sum
Minimal
pairs
Word
list
Sentence
35.13%
3.38%
10.25%
48.75%
27.50%
5.74%
13.38%
46.62%
11.38%
14.25%
17.50%
43.13%
Conversation
4.38%
17.50%
26.25%
48.13%
Sum
573/2600 = 22.03%
236/2600 = 9.07%
397/2600 = 15.26%
1206/2600 = 46.38%
using SPSS 8.0 for Windows. Results revealed no significant
difference between the four speech tasks, F(3, 76) = .441, p = .724,
r2 = .017.4 Furthermore, like those in Major’s (1994) and Weinberger’s (1987) study, students in the present study exhibited a totally
different pattern from that predicted by the “formal equals correct” axiom, which was found to be true for singleton consonants.
Figure 1 and (8) illustrate this inconsistency:
(8)
Inconsistency Between the General Prediction and
Results of the Study
Error Rates
The prediction:
Minimal Pairs < Word List < Sentences < Conversation
Results of the study:
Sentences < Word List < Conversation < Minimal Pairs
Error Types (Choice of Syllable Simplification Strategies)
The students’ choice among the three syllable simplification
strategies—epenthesis, deletion, and replacement—strongly confirms my prediction, in that the use of epenthesis increases as the
task becomes more formal, whereas the use of deletion and replacement increases as the task becomes less formal.
As indicated in Table 2, epenthesis is adopted most frequently
in the minimal pair task (35.13%), and as the task becomes less
Figure 1. Overall error rates in the four tasks.
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Language Learning
Vol. 51, No. 4
formal, the percentage of epenthesis decreases accordingly: word
list reading: 27.5%, sentence reading: 11.38%, and conversation:
4.38%. ANOVA results show that the differences among them are
significant, F(3, 76) = 20.644, p < .0001, r2 = .779, and results of
post hoc Scheffé tests reveal that the significance lies between
minimal pair/word list and sentence/conversation. This pattern is
captured in Figure 2.
As for the second point of my hypothesis, the occurrence rates
of deletion and replacement were as predicted. Both strategies
were applied most frequently in the least formal conversation
task (deletion: 17.5%, replacement: 26.25%), and the rate decreased with increasing formality of the task: sentence reading:
14.25% (deletion), 17.5% (replacement); word list reading: 5.74%
(deletion), 13.38% (replacement); minimal pair reading: 3.38%
(deletion), 10.25% (replacement). The differences among them are
significant as indicated by the ANOVA statistics (deletion:
F(3, 76) = 8.840, p < .0001, r2 = .769; replacement: F(3, 76) = 5.627,
p < .01, r2 = .459). Results of post hoc Scheffé tests reveal that the
significance for deletion lies between minimal pairs and word
list/sentence/conversation as well as between word list and conversation. For replacement, the significance lies between minimal
pair/word list and conversation. Figures 3 and 4 demonstrate the
results for deletion and replacement, respectively. Figure 5 summarizes the above discussion and the previous figures.
Discussion
Error Rates in the Four Styles
The results of the present study on Chinese students’
production of English word-initial consonant clusters support
my hypotheses. First, like those in Major’s (1994) and Weinberger’s (1987) studies, the error rates in my study do not conform
to the general prediction that more accuracy will be obtained from
L2 learners’ production of target items as the style becomes
Figure 2. Percentage of epenthesis in the four tasks.
Figure 3. Percentage of deletion in the four tasks.
Figure 4. Percentage of replacement in the four tasks.
Figure 5. Percentages of the three strategies in the four tasks.
Note: MP = Minimal Pairs; WL = Word List; S = Sentence; C = Conversation.
Lin
703
more formal. In fact, no significant difference is found in the
students’ error rates in the four speech tasks. Rather, it is found
that what alters with the degree of task formality is the strategy
that the learners choose in resolving their production difficulties.
It is worth noting that although like those in Major’s (1994)
study, students in the present study produced more errors in word
list reading than in sentence reading, which is parallel to Major’s
paragraph reading (46.63% vs. 43.13%), the pattern of students’
error rates obtained from the present experiment deviates from
that of Weinberger’s (1987) results, in which the rate of simplification is highest in the paragraph task, as shown in the comparison of the three studies in (9). Moreover, only in Major’s study is
the error rate difference significant. In other words, it seems to be
impossible to predict error rates for interlanguage consonant
clusters along the formality scale.
(9)
Comparison of the error rates in Weinberger’s, Major’s,
and the present study
Weinberger’s results:
word list reading < story-telling < paragraph reading
(not significant)
Major’s results:
paragraph reading < word list reading (significant,
p < .05)
Results of the present study:
sentence reading < word list reading < minimal pair
reading < conversation (not significant, p > .05)
Such obvious differences in the error rate patterns of the
three studies strongly support my hypothesis that, for consonant
clusters, what varies in accordance with task formality is the
strategies utilized rather than the error rates.
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Error Types/Simplification Strategies
Epenthesis. Overall, participants in this study adopted
more epentheses than deletion/replacement (22.03 vs.
9.07/15.26). Statistical comparison on the occurrence of the three
strategies using one-way ANOVA shows a significant difference,
F(2, 237) = 8.865, p < .0001, r2 = .228. Furthermore, post hoc
Scheffé tests reveal that the significance lies between epenthesis
and deletion as well as between deletion and replacement. Since
these students are all adult learners, the results thus accord with
Weinberger’s (1994) assumption that adult or advanced learners
are more apt than child learners to use epentheses, because of
their awareness of the recoverability principle—a functional principle in adult grammar.
The students’ overuse of epenthesis, especially in minimal
pair reading, may also be attributed to transfer from their nativelanguage habit. Although epenthesis is not a rule in Mandarin
(Broselow et al., 1998), in the Taiwan Mandarin phonics system,
a schwa is automatically added to an isolated consonant in order
to make it pronounceable and audible. For instance, the phonetic
symbol for Mandarin Chinese used in Taiwan for aspirated
bilabial stop is “***”, which is pronounced as [phə], with apparent
schwa insertion, rather than [ph]. This schwa epenthesis is applied
to all onset consonants, either when reading, through the paradigm of phonetic symbols, or when spelling words. For example,
when spelling a word pronounced as [phaw] (e.g., “***” throw),
which, if indicated by Taiwan Mandarin phonetic symbols, would
be “***,” one would say “[phaw](***)—[phə](***), [aw](***),
[paw](***).” Notice that the schwa is automatically added to the
stop, which is not followed by any vowel to make it pronounceable.
The high frequency of schwa epenthesis in the minimal pair
reading may thus be due to this native-language habit, which is
transferred to the interlanguage. In an attempt to make all the
consonants audible in the task in which pronunciation or phonetic
contrast is the main concern, schwa epenthesis is frequently used,
at the expense of native-like outputs of the target English words.
Lin
705
Another native-language influence comes from the Mandarin
preference for disyllabic outputs, which is transferred to the interlanguage (Broselow et al., 1998; Lin, 2001a; Wang, 1995). In this
sense, results of the present study accord with those in Lin’s
(2001a) study on the effect of number of syllables on consonant
cluster simplification strategies. Most real, as well as pseudowords,
in the present study are of the structure CCVC. In Lin’s study, the
CCVC sequence prooduced 118 vowel epentheses and 49 deletions,
yielding an epenthesis/deletion ratio of 118/49, or 2.40, which is
almost the same as that in the present study: 573/236 = 2.42. Like
Broselow et al. (1998) and Wang (1995), Lin (2001a) attributed this
tendency to Chinese speakers’ preference for disyllabic forms,
because application of epenthesis to CCVC results in disyllabic
CVCVC.
It is not surprising that epenthesis is used more frequently
in more formal styles or in situations that require more attention
to pronunciation. In addition to the functional and native-language
transfer accounts given above, this tendency can be viewed as a
result of the effect of hypercorrection (Labov, 1966). Generally,
hypercorrection occurs as one attempts to pronounce the more
prestigious, yet phonologically more marked, variant of a form
(Beebe, 1980). One of the most obvious examples of hypercorrection by Mandarin Chinese speakers is their production of the
retroflexed // in place of the plain /s/. Since one of the most
important criteria for good Mandarin speakers is their ability to
pronounce //, which is usually simplified to the less marked or
less difficult /s/ by many people in casual speech, it happens quite
often in careful speech, in which more attention is paid to the
pronunciation, that aside from higher accuracy of //, all the
instances of /s/ are also hypercorrected as //. In the present study,
the students’ extensive use of schwa epenthesis in formal styles,
which is a result of their overemphasis of the target consonants,
may also be deemed as a manifestation of hypercorrection.
Deletion and replacement. The reason for the increasing rate
of deletion and replacement in less formal styles is also straightforward. It is understandable and it conforms to most people’s
706
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intuition that sounds will be simplified (i.e., replaced by some
easier sounds) or completely dropped as more attention is paid to
the content of the speech rather than to the pronunciation. Comparison between the patterns of the two strategies (Figures 3
and 4), however, reveals that in all the four types of tasks, more
replacements are employed than deletions (overall: 15.26%
vs. 9.07%), and as indicated in the previous section, the difference
is statistically significant. This conforms to the results of previous studies on Chinese speakers’ acquisition of English consonant clusters. For instance, the Chinese EFL learners in Lin’s
(2001b) study exhibit the same contrast between these two strategies (140 replacements and 59 deletions). The main reason for this
discrepancy comes from the learners’ problems with Cl (consonant + /l/) clusters, in which as much as 54% of /l/ is replaced by
[w] or [r].5
Learners’ Errors
The above discussion on the choice among the three strategies seems to suggest that part of the reason for Chinese speakers’
application of epenthesis is their native-language habit or preference (e.g., for disyllabicity). However, although transfer or non-native-like outputs have been found to occur less frequently in formal
styles in almost all interlanguage studies (syntax: Felix, 1980;
LoCoco, 1976; M. Schmidt, 1980; morphology: Larsen-Freeman,
1975; phonology: Dickerson, 1975; Dickerson & Dickerson, 1977;
Gatbonton, 1975, 1978; Nemser, 1971; Preston, 1989; Sato, 1984,
1985; R. Schmidt, 1977, 1987; Tarone, 1979, 1982, 1983, 1988;
Wenk, 1979), the same is not true for EFL consonant clusters, as
revealed by Weinberger’s (1987) and Major’s (1994) studies, as well
as the present study. The results of my experiment on Chinese EFL
production of word-initial consonant clusters indicate that what
is shifted with style is the learners’ choice of the simplification
strategies rather than the accuracy rates.
Such discrepancies lead us to reconsider learners’ errors. As
pointed out by all the native English teachers I interviewed in
Lin
707
Taiwan, epenthesis errors, though they sound foreign, are more
endurable than deletion or replacement, since they preserve all
the original sounds. In other words, vowel epenthesis is functionally or communicatively less harmful than deletion and can be
deemed as “less erroneous” (Abrahamsson, 2001), because all the
underlying segments remain intact and are thus “recoverable”
(Weinberger, 1994).
Along this line of reasoning, the result that more epentheses
are induced from more formal styles seems to conform to the
“formal equals correct” axiom, if “correct” is redefined as “less
erroneous.” The functional principle in the learners’ grammar, as
proposed by Weinberger (1994), seems to override their concern
for target- versus non-target-like distinction.
Implications
To test the hypothesis that what varies in accordance with
the style or task formality in L2 learners’ production of consonant
clusters is their choice of syllable simplification strategies rather
than their error rates, I designed an experiment that elicited
20 Chinese EFL students’ production of English word-initial consonant clusters in four tasks of varying degrees of formality. The
results strongly support my hypothesis. As in Weinberger’s (1987)
and Major’s (1994) study, it was shown that task formality does
not guarantee production accuracy. And, as predicted, the percentage of epenthesis was higher in more formal tasks, whereas the
use of deletion and replacement increased as the task became less
formal.
I interpret the increasing use of epenthesis in more formal
styles as the effect of native-language influence and hypercorrection, and I take the increasing rates of deletion and replacement
in less formal styles to be a result of comparatively less attention
paid to the pronunciation required by the tasks.
Apparently, such findings contradict most people’s intuition
and belief that greater accuracy or less transfer will be obtained
as the style becomes more formal. It is not my intention, however,
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Language Learning
Vol. 51, No. 4
to overthrow completely this widely accepted assumption. Rather,
it is my aim to suggest a new perspective in viewing interlanguage
errors. I propose that learners’ errors should be analyzed in a more
detailed fashion by also taking into account the types of errors or
the strategies utilized when encountering production difficulties.
As discussed in the previous section, some errors might be more
serious (e.g., functionally or communicatively more harmful) than
others. I hope that this article will contribute to interlanguage
study by evoking more research interest in L2 error types or
simplification strategies, which are comparatively less frequently
investigated than learners’ error rates.
Revised version accepted 17 April 2001
Notes
1
The combination /gw/ is not included since it occurs only in ancient names
like Gwen or names of plants and is not as productive as other combinations.
2
The combination /nj/ found in some dialects of English is not included in the
discussion, since what students learn in Taiwan is American English,in which
“coronalC + [ju]” sequences are prohibited (Borowsky, 1986).
3
I did not count the replacement of voiced stops by voiceless ones (/b/, /d/, /g/
→ [p], [t], [k]) as errors for the present study, since it is a general tendency
for Chinese speakers to devoice stops regardless of their positions in a word.
In other words, devoicing is not a strategy specifically applied to consonant
clusters.
4
The level of significance assumed for all the statistics results is α = .05. r2
refers to the measure of effect size. The confidence interval for all statistical
computations in the study is 95%.
5
This phenomenon is not found in Broselow and Finer (1991), however, since
Cl combinations are investigated in this study.
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Appendix A
Background Information of the Subjects
No.
Sex
Age
Native
Language
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
M
M
M
M
M
M
M
M
M
M
F
F
F
F
F
F
F
F
F
F
22
25
23
22
34
28
27
23
24
30
35
21
21
27
29
27
26
30
30
26
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
M&T
Age started
learning
Michigan Test
English
score
13
13
13
14
14
14
13
13
13
13
13
14
13
14
14
13
13
13
13
13
57.78
62.22
51.11
57.78
55.56
42.22
53.33
66.67
51.11
46.67
46.67
64.44
60.00
62.22
53.33
42.22
57.78
51.11
53.33
55.56
Note: Native Languages: M: Mandarin Chinese, T: Taiwanese.
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Language Learning
Appendix B
Pseudowords
Nouns
1. dwek:
2. blace:
3. prook:
4. trook:
5. greep:
6. slike:
7. cloot:
8. muke:
9. vute:
10. creen:
11. cupe:
a kind of flower
a kind of flower
a kind of flower
a kind tool
a kind of fruit
a kind of cookie
a kind of candy
a kind of drink
a kind of drink
a kind of musical instrument
a kind of musical instrument
Verbs
1. fleese:
2. smeep:
3. plee:
4. sweek:
a kind of sport
a kind of sport
a kind of sport
a kind of sport
Adjectives
1. gleer:
2. dreep:
3. fute:
4. pute:
5. bute:
6. twip:
7. freese:
8. sneep:
9. kweel:
10. breeg:
happy
a color
a color
a color
a color
tired
frightened
sad
spoiled
smell bad
Vol. 51, No. 4
Lin
Appendix C
The Production Tasks
I. Read the following pairs of words aloud:
1. gleam
/
[glim]
2. dwek
/
[dwεk]
3. proof
[pruf]
gleer
[glir]
dwell
[dwεl]
/
prook
/
[pruk]
4. slide
/
slike
[slayd]
/
[slayk]
5. sneep
[snip]
/
smeep
/
[smip]
6. mute
/
muke
[mjut]
/
[mjuk]
7. blace
[bles]
8. sweet
[swit]
9. trook
[truk]
10. greep
[grip]
/
place
/
[ples]
/
sweek
/
[swik]
/
truck
/
[tr∧k]
/
dreep
/
[drip]
11. vute
/
fute
[vjut]
/
[fjut]
12. cloot
/
croot
[klut]
/
[crut]
13. clean
[klin]
/
creen
/
[krin]
14. few
/
view
[fju]
/
[vju]
15. plee
[pli]
/
blee
/
[bli]
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Language Learning
16. breeg
/
breed
/
[brid]
/
freese
[flis]
/
[fris]
18. flee
/
free
[brig]
17. fleese
/
[fri]
19. pute
[fli]
/
bute
[pjut]
/
[bjut]
20. twin
/
twip
[twin]
/
[twip]
Vol. 51, No. 4
II. Read the following word list:
1. glear
7. blace
13. creen
19. twip
25. few
31. slide
2. dwek
8. sweek
14. fute
20. bute
26. clean
32. proof
3. prook
9. trook
15. plee
21. sneep
27. truck
33. dwell
4. slike
10. dreep
16. breeg
22. greep
28. sweet
34. gleam
5. smeep
11. vute
17. fleese
23. freese
29. place
6. muke
12. cloot
18. pute
24. free
30. mute
III. Below are 11 pairs of sentences. Read the correct one:
1. a. There are many beautiful dreep roses and fute prook
in my garden.
b. There is many beautiful dreep roses and fute prook in
my garden.
2. a. His favorite color is blue, but he is a gleer person.
b. His favorite color is blue, but he is a gleer people.
3. a. In February in my hometown, I like to go out with my
friends to fleese on the lake or smeep in the bute
mountains.
b. On February in my hometown, I like to go out with my
friends to fleese on the lake or smeep in the bute
mountains
4. a. My brother is good about playing the creen, but he is
poor at sports, especially plee.
Lin
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
b. My brother is good at playing the creen, but he is poor at
sports, especially plee.
a. I’m hungry and twip, please give me some slike and cloot.
b. I’m hungry and twip, please give me any slike and cloot.
a. Which flower do you prefer? The green dwek in the glass
or the red blace in the snap?
b. How many flower do you prefer? The green dwek in the
glass or the red blace in the snap?
a. Drive slower! You are making me freese!
b. Drive slower! You are making me to freese!
a. To sweek on the pute snow in wintertime is a lot of funny.
b. To sweek on the pute snow in wintertime is a lot of fun.
a. Yesterday a friend of mine cried and told me that she
was going to get divorce and she felt very sneep about it.
b. Yesterday a friend of mine cried and told me that she
was going to get divorced and she felt very sneep about it.
a. Please clean the trook thoroughly. It smells so breeg.
b. Please clean the trook thoroughly. It smells such breeg.
a. I like to have greep juices after breakfast and muke or
vute after lunch.
b. I like to have greep juice after breakfast and muke or
vute after lunch.
IV. Conversation
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
717
What time did you go to sleep last night?
Do you have any brothers or sisters?
Do you wear glasses?
Do you like to travel? What’s your favorite place to go?
What’s your favorite flower?
Who’s your best classmate?
What’s your favorite sport? Do you like to swim?
What’s your favorite color? Do you like blue or green?
What’s your favorite food? Do you like ice cream?
Do you like snow?
What’s your most serious problem in college?
718
Language Learning
Vol. 51, No. 4
12. Do you smoke?
13. What do you like to do in your free time?
Do you often dream? Talk about the most unforgettable dream
that you’ve ever had.