GENDER AND ACCENT IN THE PERCEPTION OF ENGLISH SYLLABIC CONSONANTS VS. SCHWA

Abstract

[EN] This paper reports a study on the perception of English syllabic consonants vs. schwa in word fi nal position at discourse level. Our aim is to fi nd out whether gender and accent play a signifi cant role in the pereception of potential syllabic consonants, a topic which needs further research (see Takefuta & Black 1966; Bloom, Moore-Schoenmakers & Masataka 1999). Three females indentifi ed a schwa/syllabic consonant in 800 words uttered in specifi c contextx by 80 non-rhotic native newsreaders (40m/40f) from the BBC Learning English Website. The statistical procedures used were the contingency table analysis and Kendall's correlation coeffi cient. The study reveals that gender and accent do not perform a signifi cant role in the perception of this alternation. They were found not to infl uence the referees' perception, their degree of agreement being quite similar in the categories of each variable. The exploration of the schwa vs. syllabic consonant perception in terms of word position (within an utterance) and word emphasis is suggested.