Voiceless Stop Consonants in Malaysian English

Yamaguchi, Toshiko; Pétursson, Magnús

doi:10.1080/13488678.2012.10801330

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…This is also in line with evidence showing that English varieties such as Malaysian English (ME) are capable of creating new subvariants of phonemic units. For example, Yamaguchi and Pétursson (2012) found that the alveolar stop ([t]) used to replace /θ/ or /ð/ in word-initial position in ME did not resemble the VOT values of the original ME [t] (e.g., in t eeth ), and this was consistent across speakers of different ethnicities. They therefore concluded that ME was creating a new realization of stop consonants, particularly one that was replacing /θ/ in word-initial position.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They often tend to be spontaneous and are not driven by language factors. Yamaguchi and Pétursson (2012) identify the word-initial /θ/→[t] phonetic change in ME to be sporadic, as they note that all their participants also retained the dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ in their phonemic inventory. In a similar vein, almost all our participants retained /θ/ in their phonemic inventory, as not all instances of /θ/ were being replaced consistently, and not all Tamil speakers in our study demonstrated the /v/→[w] phonetic change and were still able to articulate /v/ as intended.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The target consonants were then also evaluated using Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2018) by looking at the spectral energies of the fricatives. And for the stop /t/, we adopted a cut-off voice onset time (VOT) length of 30 milliseconds to determine if the stop was aspirated ([t h ]) or unaspirated ([t]), a method used by past studies (e.g., Lisker & Abramson, 1964; Yamaguchi & Pétursson, 2012) which have yielded consistent results.…”

Section: Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Homogenization of Ethnic Differences in Singapore English? A Consonantal Production Study

2020

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Past research on Singapore English (SgE) has shown that there are specific segmental and prosodic patterns that are unique to the three major ethnic groups, Chinese, Malay, and Indian in Singapore. These features have been highlighted as the “stereotypical” ethnic markers of SgE speakers, assuming substrate influence from the speakers’ “ethnic” languages (Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil). However, recent research suggests that Singaporeans are becoming increasingly English dominant and has challenged the position of the ethnic languages as true “mother tongues” of Singaporeans. Hence, this study seeks to question if such “stereotypical” ethnic features exist, and if so, the extent to which a less dominant ethnic language would affect the phonology of speakers’ English. This study looks specifically at the production of consonants /f/, /θ/, /t/, /v/, and /w/ as salient segmental features in SgE. Participants’ phonetic behavior of /θ/, which was produced similarly across the three ethnic groups, disputed substrate influence. Tamil speakers were the most disparate, particularly with the /v/-/w/ contrast production. However, these deviations were often sporadic phonetic changes, which scarcely reflect robust speech patterns in the community. As a result, consonantal production in SgE is found to be largely independent of substrate influence and relatively uniform across the three ethnicities. The homogeneity observed in this study sheds light on bilinguals’ acquisition of sounds, and it also provides phonological evidence toward the understanding of the evolutionary process of postcolonial Englishes.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Homogenization of Ethnic Differences in Singapore English? A Consonantal Production Study

2020

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“…Al-Hamadi & Ali, 2012;Ali, 2013;Hubais & Pillai, 2010;Khalil, 2014); likewise, some studies instrumentally analyzed the consonants produced by nonnative speakers of English. For example, Mahmood, Asghar and Jabeen (2011) instrumentally examined the/θ/ and/ð/Sounds in Pakistani English; Yamaguchi and Pḗtursson (2014) examined the voiceless stop consonants in Malaysian English. Although very few studies (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Instrumental Analysis of the English Stops Produced by Arabic Speakers of English

Abdelaal¹

2017

IJELS

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This study reports the findings of a research that was conducted on ten (10) Arab students, who were enrolled in a master of English applied linguistics program at Universiti Putra Malaysia. The research aimed at instrumentally analyzing the English stops produced by Arab learners, in terms of voice onset time (VOT); identifying the effect of their mother tongue on producing the English stops; and the extent Arabic speakers of English differentiate in terms of pronunciation between minimal pairs. The findings of the study showed that some of the subjects’ VOT values were similar to native speakers of English. It was also found that the subjects could differentiate in terms of aspiration or voicing between /p/ and /b/, which refutes the assumption that Arab learners have a problem in producing the /p/ sound with appropriate aspiration. However, they did not show significant difference in pronunciation between the /t/ and /d/ or between the /k/ and /g/. Moreover, there is a kind of limited effect of the L1 on producing some stops (e.g. /t/ and /g/). However, for the /b/ sound, it cannot be inferred that there is interference from the mother tongue because its VOT value is almost the same in English and Arabic. This research suggests that teachers need to enhance Arab learners’ pronunciation of some minimal pairs such as /t/ and /d/ or /k/ and /g/.

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Nativised structural patterns of make light verb construction in Malaysian English

Ong

Rahim

2021

ConSL

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This study investigated nativised structural patterns of light verb constructions (LVCs) in Malaysian English using a corpus-based, descriptive approach to analyse grammatical innovations. To facilitate the analysis, a 100-million-word general corpus comprising threads from Lowyat.Net, a popular Internet forum in Malaysia, was created, and the British National Corpus (BNC) was used as the reference corpus. Using the Sketch Engine corpus tool, the three most frequently occurring make LVCs in the Malaysian English corpus were identified. The data was analysed to reveal the differences between the structures of make LVC in Malaysian English and its prototypical structure. The findings show that besides the non-isomorphic deverbal noun form, make LVCs in Malaysian English prefer taking the basic constituents of an LVC. Nativised LVCs are essentially those with zero articles and isomorphic deverbal nouns taking definite articles, determiners, and descriptive adjectives in their modifier slots. The zero article LVC is the most common nativised structure pattern due to the influence of substrate languages in Malaysian English.

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Voiceless Stop Consonants in Malaysian English

Cited by 4 publications

References 1 publication

The Homogenization of Ethnic Differences in Singapore English? A Consonantal Production Study

The Homogenization of Ethnic Differences in Singapore English? A Consonantal Production Study

Instrumental Analysis of the English Stops Produced by Arabic Speakers of English

Nativised structural patterns of make light verb construction in Malaysian English

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