Pre-Fortis Clipping by Estonian Learners of English: A Case Study

Abstract

Many linguists, such as Jenkins (2000) and Celce-Murcia et al (2010) find that EFL learners must be taught pre-fortis clipping to avoid unintelligibility as pre-fortis clipping has proved not to come as naturally to EFL learners as for native speakers. The purpose of this thesis is to discover how Estonian learners of English produce pre-fortis clipping because it has never been studied in Estonian EFL learners before and pre-fortis clipping is not part of the Estonian sound system. A pronunciation test was conducted on three native speakers of English and ten Estonian EFL students. The results of the L1 Estonian students were compared to the ones of the native speakers. This thesis opens with an introduction which includes the incentive for writing this thesis along with the definitions of the main concepts. The first chapter focuses on the possible reasons pre-fortis clipping exists, the differences of pre-fortis clipping in American English and British English, gives an overview of the Estonian and English sound systems related to pre-fortis clipping, and explores previous studies on the topic. The second chapter presents the nature of the pronunciation test and the methodology along with a results section and a discussion of the results. The thesis ends with a conclusion that summarizes the findings of this present thesis.