Multi-Linguistic Interferences in the Articulation of English Fricatives among Selected Students in a Public University in Lokoja, Nigeria

Abstract

In the quest to solve human communication problems, the need to learn a foreign language arises, and this usually occurs in a multilingual setting. In the process of this learning, some challenges occur, especially the phonological phenomenon of interference. Given this challenge, the paper contributes to scholarly works on language learning by exploring the articulation of English fricatives by selected [ethnic] students of the Federal University Lokoja (FUL), Lokoja, Nigeria. The researchers carefully selected some participants from the Ebira, Igala and Okun-Yoruba ethnic groups, which form the majority of ethnicities in the university community. A total of 60 students were selected for this study; 20 each from the 3 major ethnic groups in FUL. The major instrument used for this research is the Read Aloud Method, containing nine carefully structured sentences each containing a target English fricative sound. The selected test items were read aloud by the participants and subjected to both perceptual and acoustic analyses. The acoustic analysis was done using the speech analyzer PRAAT. Audio-Articulation Model developed by Mehmet Demirezen was used as the framework for this study. The study reveals that there is a dominant influence from the mother tongue of the participants as they were unable to properly articulate some fricatives in some cases. Also, the study found that there is an overlapping peculiar to the different speakers representing each ethnic group. It can be concluded that since ethnic groups have their distinct languages, it is a factor in the inability of speakers to properly produce fricative sounds. This absence of the fricatives in the L1 shows up in the production of the L2.