La percepción de las consonantes silábicas inglesas. Reglas y contextos fonémicos

  1. Arboleda Guirao, Inmaculada de Jesús
  2. Monroy Casas, Rafael
Journal:
Tonos digital: revista de estudios filológicos

ISSN: 1577-6921

Year of publication: 2010

Issue: 19

Type: Article

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Abstract

This is a study on the perception of English syllabic consonants vs. schwa in word final position at discourse level. In particular, we aim at finding out whether the listeners� perception of the behaviour of these phonemes differs in the different rules and phonemic contexts such phonemes occur. For this purpose, we explore the degree of dis/agreement amongst the referees and the factors which may have an influence on this degree of dis/agreement. The informants were 80 non-rhotic English newsreaders (40 males and 40 females) from the BBC Learning English website. Three females identified schwa/syllabic in 800 words. The statistical procedure used was the contingency table analysis. The results reveal that there are considerable differences in the different rules and phonemic contexts as far as the syllabic consonant vs. schwa perception is concerned. A more comprehensive approach would involve a wider sample of both informants and listeners as well as an exploration of perception in view of emphasis, accent and speaking rate.

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