Epenthesis-A Constraint-driven Syllable Adaptation In The Acquisition Of English By Native Speakers Of Chinese

This study suggests another perspective—an OT perspective to view syllable simplification and account for developmental stages in acquiring English syllable structure for native speakers of Chinese.Concerning such issues as epenthesis, deletion, feature change in ESL learning for the native speakers of Chinese, there have been studies undertaken from either traditional phonetic or phonological perspective. In the OT framework, second language acquisition is seen as constraint reranking; the process of L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition are equally error-driven and influenced by UG. In the process of learning English for the native speakers of Chinese, epenthesis, deletion and replacement (or feature change), frequently occur. It is generally assumed that epenthesis is one of the syllable modifications—one of the learning strategies in the process of learning English as a second language for the learners with Chinese as their first language when they are confronting consonant clusters and consonant ending of a syllable-final, and this, to a large degree, can be attributed to L1 transfer.In this study, in the light of Rachel Lee Hayes's model (2001) of research design, 6 first-year college students coming from the rural area were selected as subjects, and their utterances of English consonant clusters were observed in three months. All the data of their epenthesis were recorded and analyzed. The study is intended to(1) illustrate why epenthesis(insertion of vowels in consonant clusters and consonant-finals) occurs, what the epenthetic vowels are, where they are inserted in the Optimality Theoretic framework(Prince & Smolensky,1993);...