PHONOLOGICAL AND MATURATIONAL CONSTRAINTS ON RHOTACISM OF SOME YORUBA-ENGLISH SPEAKING INDIGENES IN LAGOS STATE (original) (raw)

2022, PHONOLOGICAL AND MATURATIONAL CONSTRAINTS ON RHOTACISM OF SOME YORUBA-ENGLISH SPEAKING INDIGENES IN LAGOS STATE

Precise pronunciation is one of the requisites for effective language communication, as mispronunciation impedes perception and comprehension. Rhotacism is a speech disorder characterised by the lack of precise articulation of the "r-" family, which could be linked to the lack of sufficient air-flow in the vocal tract, inappropriate movement and positioning of the tongue, and the lack of the tongue's regular articulatory exercises among sufferers. This type of "r" imprecise pronunciation is frequent in early childhood development, and it usually does not pose problems for parents because it is anticipated to fix itself naturally at such an early stage. Accordingly, when a child reaches the age of six without the impediment being fixed, intervention is advised. This study seeks to determine why some Yoruba-English-speaking indigenes of Lagos State mispronounce the alveolar trill /r/ and how to remedy the disorder. A qualitative approach was employed to accomplish this study. Thirty members of the Christ Victory Church in Lagos Island, aged 25 to 45, were purposively chosen and participated in the study because they had difficulty pronouncing the trill "r." They were given a pre-made word list with 34 trill /r/ letters. The first 24 words were concatenated to form sentences, while the remaining 10 words were pronounced in isolation. The participants were asked to read the sentences and pronounce the words aloud, with their pronunciations being recorded on a digital recorder. Following that, perceptual, phonological, and contrastive analyses were conducted on the data. The findings revealed that some Yoruba-English-speaking indigenes in Lagos state are immersed in rhotacism, which suggests that they mispronounce "r" as a bilabial, velar approximant /w/.