The Influence of Explicit Phonetic Instruction and Production Training Practice on Awareness Raising in the Realization of Stop Consonant Clusters by Advanced Polish Learners of English

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the occurrence of unreleased oral stop in the production of English voice agreeing plosive clusters straddling word boundaries in the context of one intonation unit within a sentence. This is the only distribution similar to Polish thus triggering the unreleased stops production in the outlined context. Whereas in English it is optional and common (Gimson and Cruttenden 1994), it is hard to establish the precise tolerance of Polish language to no release burst. The data from the observations are often contradictory and even the most tolerant phonetic context does not guarantee significantly low release rates. Moreover, the commonly accepted belief that Polish stop geminates are unreleased is questioned (Rojczyk 2008) and English is far more tolerant to no release burst (Sobkowiak 2001; Jassem 1993; Jassem 1975). In the light of these observations the problems with the cessation in the release burst among Polish advanced learners of English can be noticed, thus constituting the focus of the study. In the production experiment the subjects are tested on the plosion release rate in 18 English voice agreeing stop clusters straddling word boundaries in two recording sessions separated by explicit theoretical phonetic instruction and practice. The acquisition progress is checked during the second test. Finally the obtained results are analyzed regarding the individual speaker’s drop in the release rate, voicing and the place of articulation variables. The release rates from the first and the second session are juxtaposed and the drop in the number of released stops is estimated.