This research work studies the production of final consonant clusters in English regular verbs past forms and their link with initial vowel sounds of following words. The study was carried out in Tarragona, Spain, with 20 Spanish-Catalan native speakers of first year of Bachillerato. The aim was to provide instruction on splitting the final consonant cluster of a word and linking it to the following initial sound by raising awareness of the pronunciation of -ed endings in past verbs. The investigation responds to two main questions 1) To what extent does pronunciation awareness of final consonant clusters have an impact on producing -ed endings in past regular verbs?, and 2) What is the impact of providing instruction on splitting the final consonant cluster and linking it to the following initial vowel sound? The data was gathered by recording participants while reading 10 sentences and 10 verbs, before and after a treatment, and analyze with PRAAT. Results show a noticeable improvement in the correct production of the past forms of regular verbs by the control and experimental groups, as well as a more native-like pronunciation when linking consonant clusters in -ed endings and initial vowels sounds in the experimental group.
Cite as: Romero, D., Crison, C., Romero, J. (2018) Producing sounds in contact by raising awareness of final -ed consonant clusters in English. Proc. International Symposium on Applied Phonetics (ISAPh 2018), 110-115, doi: 10.21437/ISAPh.2018-20
@inproceedings{romero18_isaph,
author={Daniel Romero and Cristina Crison and Joaquín Romero},
title={{Producing sounds in contact by raising awareness of final -ed consonant clusters in English}},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. International Symposium on Applied Phonetics (ISAPh 2018)},
pages={110--115},
doi={10.21437/ISAPh.2018-20}
}