Acquiring Angma: The Velar Nasal in Advanced Learners’ English

Abstract

The English velar nasal, known as angma or engma, belongs to consonants that are most difficult to master by Poles, in spite of the fact that this sound occurs also in Polish as a result of the assimilation of the dental nasal to the following velar plosives (e.g. in tango ‘tango’ pronounced as [^ltaŋgɔ]). It is problematic for Polish learners, however, in other contexts, i.e. word-finally, as in bring, before vowels, as in singer, and before non-velars, as in strongly, where the velar nasal is pronounced with a following velar plosive. This paper examines the acquisition of the velar nasal by 60 advanced/proficient Polish learners of English, students at the English Department of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland. The realization of angma is scrutinized with a view to uncovering regularities in its acquisition by the participants, establishing their success rate and the degree of difficulty in the production of the velar nasal in each of the three problematic contexts. The obtained results are compared with those pertaining to students’ acquisition of ash, schwa and unstressed unreduced vowels in order to characterize advanced learners’ interlanguage in more detail. The presented observations carry important pedagogical implications for the phonetic training of Poles.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Appendix 1 List of lexical items used in the experiment

Appendix 2

List of Sentences used in the experiment

1. In the old days in most kingdoms the hangman’s job belonged to highly prestigious professions.

2. She kept wringing her hands in despair when she thought of the way that gang was stringing her husband along.

3. When he lived among the bushmen there was nothing he missed more than “Jerry Springer Show.”

4. After the night of drinking, singing songs and banging on the drums in a Nottingham bar they had a terrible hangover and pangs of conscience.

5. This youngish-looking man with longish hair was a singer in a terrible hangout in Wellington suburbs.

6. With his aristocratic upbringing he felt quite at ease in Buckingham Palace, where he received a medal and a royal ring.

7. I strongly agree that it was wrong to allow the children to do all that hanging from the ropes, springing from the furniture, ringing the bells and flinging things at each other.

8. They rang us up to tell us about their weekend trip to Reading, Langdale, Birmingham and Arlington.

9. Surprisingly we didn’t know they enjoyed horse-riding and playing ping pong.

10. He thought of prolonging his stay in Bingen in order to buy new strings for his guitar, nice earrings for his girl-friend and some wooden coat hangers.

11. Because of the fire in our neighbours’ house our eyes were stinging from the smoke.

12. The ringers of the bells kept clinging to the ladder of the church tower.

13. This young man from Springfield had stringy arms and slangy speech.

14. He drove his old banger swinging it from the left to the right and slinging mud all over the place.

15. They were wrongly suspected of belonging to a terrorist organization.