Consonant clusters and intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca in Japan

Abstract

This is a qualitative study of the relationship between consonant cluster articulation and intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca interactions in Japan (Jenkins 2000; Matsumoto 2011). Some research has claimed that the full articulation of consonant clusters in lexeme-initial and lexeme-medial position is critical to the maintenance of intelligibility (Jenkins 2000, 2002, 2007; Walker 2010; Deterding 2013). Using conversation analytic methodology to examine a corpus of repair sequences in interactions among English as a Lingua Franca speakers at a Japanese university, this study claims that consonant elision in consonant clusters in lexeme-initial, lexeme-medial, and lexeme-final position can attenuate intelligibility, and that the insertion of an elided consonant into a word that was oriented to as unintelligible can help restore intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca.