Kryssi Morales and Jaskirat Sidhu, “Consonant Cluster Durational Patterns in L2 English Speakers in Reference to L1 English Speakers”
Mentor: Jing Yang, Communication Sciences & Disorders
Poster #151

Consonant clusters are a sequence of consonants in a syllable with no intervening vowels. This type of phonetic structure is typical in the English language but not in some other languages like Mandarin. This study examines the temporal coordination of selected English consonant clusters produced by native Mandarin speakers who learned English as a second language in reference to native English speakers. The participants in this study consisted of six native English speakers (L1) and ten Mandarin-speaking English learners (L2). The speech materials were nonsense English monosyllabic words in the form of /bvC/ containing three-component clusters –spt, -skt, -pst, -kst in the word-final position preceded by the corner’s vowels /a/, /i/, or /u/. The participants were recorded producing the target words embedded in the carrier sentence “I say the word xx for you” in a sound-treated room. The recorded speech samples were segmented into individual sentence tokens. For the target words containing the tested consonant clusters, the landmark locations of each component in the clusters were measured and calculated. For each token, the temporal features consisted of the absolute duration of each component and the cluster, the ratio of each component to cluster, the ratio of cluster to word, and the ratio of each component to word, which will then be measured and calculated. The findings from this study will enhance our understanding of the difficulty of cluster production reflected in the temporal organization in L2 learners. As a result, this study provides informative data about the temporal coordination and accuracy of L2 learners.