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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

THE ACQUISITION OF THE ENGLISH VELAR NASAL /ŋ/ BY SAUDI SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH: ARE THERE DEVELOPMENTAL TRENDS?

Al Ahmari, Saleha Hussain 01 August 2014 (has links)
This study aims to examine the developmental acquisition trends of English nasal /ŋ/ by Saudi learners of English. According to the previous literature, the velar nasal /ŋ/ presents significant difficulties for learners of English, especially for Arabic speakers. The literature indicates that their most serious problem lies in their tendency to insert a stop after the velar nasal, such as singing /sɪŋɪŋ/ pronounced as [sɪŋgɪŋg]. Accordingly, this study aims to examine this claim by studying Saudi learners of English as a second language to find the types of committed errors, and the effects of length of residence and language use in diminishing such tendencies. For this purpose, participants representing two ranges of length of residence in the US (LOR < 1 year and LOR >4 years) were recruited. The instruments included both a demographic questionnaire and a production task. A list of English words ending with the velar nasal preceded by different vowels was given. Data analysis made use of speech analyzer, descriptive statistics, frequency analyses, and an independent t-test to see if there are significant developmental trends in the acquisition of the target sound. The findings of this study provide empirical evidence in support of some of the most well-known theories in second language acquisition, namely, Contrastive Analysis hypothesis (Lado, 1957), Markedness Differential Hypothesis (Eckman, 1977), and Language Transfer Theory (Odlin, 1986; Gass & Selinker 1994). The absence of the marked velar nasal in coda position and the phonological rules of its use in the marked coda position caused many types of serious mispronunciations in Saudis' oral production of English words that end in such a segment. Resulting types of errors stem from the negative transfer of the allophonic environment of the velar nasal in Arabic language. Such transfer decreases as the length of residence and L2 use increase.

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