A comparative descriptive study of the impact of gender on english pronunciation an acoustic study of affricates
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Date
2021
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Larbi Ben M’hidi University-Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
Sociolinguistics and phonetics are regarded as important branches in the field of the academic writing. This research attempts to provide an experimental evidence whether students pronounce affricates appropriately or no, and whether there is an acoustic difference between both genders /?/ and /?/ voice onset time. A growing body of evidence suggests that gender is correlated with pronunciation. However, previous studies have not dealt with the impact of gender on affricates pronunciation specifically.
Of particular concern, this study seeks to answer the following questions: do EFL learners pronounce affricates correctly or do they make mistakes? Does gender affect pronunciation? Is there any difference between males and females voice onset time of affricates? The study is based on 32 Algerian participants; they are third year students of English at LArbi Ben M'hidi University. They are divided into two categories: males and females. In the process of conducting this research, isolated words and words in contexts contain affricates were used to describe students' pronunciation and transcription. All participants were included in these activities, and their pronunciations were recorded. Praat program was used to measure acoustically the recordings, and a statistical analysis of four words was made using SPSS software to examine the significance of the variable gender in pronunciation. Hence, We compared pronunciation of eight students. For the first question, the results indicated that some EFL learners make mistakes when pronouncing /?/ or /?/. For the second and the third questions, gender has an impact on pronunciation, and the comparison showed that the VOT of thr score mean of females is longer than the VOT of score mean of males of /?/ and /?/. On account of these findings, limitations were identified and suggestions for further research were stated.
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Keywords
Voice Onset Time, Gender, Phonetics, Sociolinguistics, Affricates