© 2003 by Oxford University Press
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Interphonology Variability: Sociolinguistic Factors Affecting L2 Simplification Strategies
1 Chung Hua University, Taiwan
This study investigates variability in interlanguage consonant cluster simplification strategies within the four factors–style, gender, proficiency, and interlocutor. An experiment was designed to examine how these factors determine Chinese EFL speakers' production of English word-initial consonant clusters. Results reveal that L2 learners' performance shows its significance only when their error types, rather than error rates, are considered. The forty participants' choice of the simplification strategies highly confirms predictions made from L1 as well as L2 research results or principles concerning the four factors tested. As hypothesized, the participants' proportion of epenthesis to deletion is higher in more formal styles than in less formal styles, for high proficiency students than for the low proficiency group, for female speakers than for their male counterparts. As for the interlocutor factor, a significant difference is found between female students' speech to their native-speaker teacher and their non-native-speaker classmate. Such results not only confirm previous L2 studies on the proficiency factor, but also support (1) the characterization of learners' errors as more vs. less ‘erroneous’; (2) the ‘formal equals accurate axiom’; and (3) the claim that women are more likely to accommodate their speech to their interlocutors than males.
Received January 2003.