[Corpora-List] repair strategies in Pakistani English

[farhat jabeen]

I am a student of M. Phil Applied Linguistics and my area of interest is
acoustic phonetics. I intend to work on the use of repair strategies
(epenthesis, vowel deletion or expansion, consonant insertion or
deletion, consonant
lengthening at different positions, presence or absence of germination, etc.)
in Pakistani English (PE). Zhang, Nissan and Francis (2008) claim that the
structures of mother tongue influence the acquisition and production of L2
features. Moreover, we believe that the difference between the L1 and L2
legal syllable templates results in the use of repair strategies. The
syllable template of English (C3VC4) is different from that of Urdu (CV2C2)
and Punjabi (C2V2C2) which are the two widely used languages of Pakistan.
This difference results in the use of repair strategies by Pakistani English
users of Punjabi L1 who also use Urdu regularly in their lives.  As we can
see English allows complex consonant clusters at onset and coda positions
whereas Urdu does not tolerate complex onset and Punjabi allows them
marginally only. We hypothesise that this difference in tolerance for
complex onset and coda causes the Pakistani English language users to resort
to using repair strategies. We intend to study this phenomenon acoustically
with the help of software such as PRAAT and Wave surfer. For that purpose we
will choose a list of words in isolation and the same words will be
presented in carrier phrases. The intention is to study the difference in
the use of repair strategies in isolation as well as in context. This will
also help us study the difference in slow and fast speech. The criterion for
word selection is the occurrence of consonant clusters at word initial,
medial and final position as it will help us study the position and nature
of repair strategies. The words will be studied in controlled vocalic
context i.e. only the front vowels will be studied in association with the
consonant clusters. we will slelect thirty graduate and post graduate
students (15 male & 15 female) as participants. A further possibility will
be to study gender based differences in the use of repair strategies. Having
introduced the scope and dimension of my study, I seek answers to the
following questions:
1.       Should I use a standard word list for word selection?
2.       As compared to other consonant clusters, C3 occurs only in limited
contexts in English, so is it practically possible to restrict the vocalic
context to front vowels only?
3.       Repair strategies are numerous. What acoustic correlates shall I
concentrate upon for various strategies?
4.       Should the words be presented in meaningful context? I believe that
if we use controlled vocalic context, nonsense phrases will be easier to
formulate than meaningful sentences.
5.       How can PRAAT/Wave Surfer help me in the analysis?

opinions and suggestions about the whole scheme of research are highly
welcome.

-- 

*FARHAT*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20110808/eabf06e0/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora