Segmental and Supragmental Features
Segmental and Supragmental Features
Segmental and Supragmental Features
(0304181017)
Abstract
The aim of the present study was to examine the relation between decoding
and segmental and suprasegmental phonology, and their contribution to reading
comprehension, in the upper primary grades. Following a longitudinal design, the
performance of 99 Dutch primary school children on phonological awareness
(segmental phonology) and text reading prosody (suprasegmental phonology) in
fourth-grade and fifth-grade, and reading comprehension in sixth-grade were
examined. In addition, decoding efficiency as a general assessment of reading was
examined. Structural path modeling firstly showed that the relation between
decoding efficiency and both measures of phonology from fourth- to fifth grade
was unidirectional. Secondly, the relation between decoding in fourth- and fifth-
grade and reading comprehension in sixth-grade became indirect when segmental
and suprasegmental phonology were added to the model. Both factors
independently exerted influence on later reading comprehension. This leads to the
conclusion that not only segmental, but also suprasegmental phonology, contributes
substantially to children's reading development.
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SEGMENTAL AND SUPRAGMENTAL FEATURES
A. Segmental
Phonemes are the minimal units or one of a small speech sounds or also
known as segments that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular
language to represent differences in meaning. Using substitution test, the phoneme
status can be proven through the substituting one segment for another that can
produce a different word, for example, the phoneme of /e/ and /ɪ/ in desk and disk.
Any pair of words exists that differs in one sound only or distinguished by just one
segment called a minimal pair (Poole, 1999: 57). In English, the segments of
phonemes consist of two aspects namely the consonant phonemes and vowel
phonemes.
A.1 Consonant
In English, there are 24 consonant phonemes which can be categorised into
6 oral stops {/p, b, t, d, k, g/}, 3 nasal stops {/m, n, ŋ}, 4 approximants {/l, r, j,
w/}, 2 affricates {/tʃ, dʒ/}, and 9 fricatives {/f, v, ð, θ, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, m, h/} (Giegerich,
1992: 41).
Comparing the English consonant phonemes with Indonesian consonants
phonemes, there are slight differences. The most differences found in fricatives and
affricates. For Indonesian, they perceived the phonemes /f/ and /v/ as /p/ while /ʃ/,
/z/, /ʒ/ as /s/. The latter is both phonemes are alveo-palatal in Indonesia while in
English the phonemes are palato- alveolar or also labelled as postalveolar (Alip,
2016: 16).
As indicated is believed to have had a relatively simple consonant system.
In addition, all syllables were open in PB, and syllable onsets mostly consisted
of a single consonant. The two possible exceptions t o this are nasal+consonant
and consonant+glide.
1. Nasal+Consonant
Nearly all nasal consonants are nasal occlusive, in which air escapes through
the nose but not through the mouth, as it is blocked (occluded) by the lips or tongue.
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The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound. Rarely, non-
occlusive consonants may be nasalized.
Most nasals are voiced, and in fact, the nasal sounds [n] and [m] are among
the most common sounds cross-linguistically. Voiceless nasals occur in a few
languages such as Burmese, Welsh, Icelandic and Guaraní. (Compare oral stops,
which block off the air completely, and fricatives, which obstruct the air with a
narrow channel. Both stops and fricatives are more commonly voiceless than
voiced, and are known as obstruent’s.)
In terms of acoustics, nasals are sonorants, which means that they do not
significantly restrict the escape of air (as it can freely escape out the nose).
However, nasals are also obstruent’s in their articulation because the flow of air
through the mouth is blocked. This duality, a sonorant airflow through the nose
along with an obstruction in the mouth, means that nasal occlusive behave both like
sonorants and like obstruents. For example, nasals tend to pattern with other
sonorants such as [r] and [l], but in many languages, they may develop from or into
stops.
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• Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the
vocal cords.
• It is a nasal consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the nose,
either exclusively (nasal stops) or in addition to through the mouth.
• Because the sound is not produced with airflow over the tongue, the central–
lateral dichotomy does not apply.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing
air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds.
More rarely, a language will contrast oral /h/ and nasal /h̃/. Two such
languages are neighboring Bantu languages of Angola and
Namibia, Kwangali and Mbukushu. In these languages, vowels following /h̃/ are
nasalized, though nasal vowels do not occur elsewhere. A distinction is also
reported from Wolaytta, though in that case the nasal is rare.
The voiced velar nasal, also known as agma, from the Greek word for
'fragment', is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. It is the
sound of ng in English sing. The symbol in the International Phonetic
Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ŋ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol
is N . The IPA symbol ⟨ŋ⟩ is similar to ⟨ɳ⟩, the symbol for the retroflex nasal, which
has a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the right stem, and to
⟨ɲ⟩, the symbol for the palatal nasal, which has a leftward-pointing hook extending
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from the bottom of the left stem. Both the IPA symbol and the sound are commonly
called 'eng' or 'engma'.
As a phoneme, the velar nasal does not occur in many of the indigenous
languages of the Americas or in many European or Middle Eastern or Caucasian
languages, but it is extremely common in Australian Aboriginal languages and is
also common in many languages of Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, Southeast
Asia and Polynesia. While almost all languages have /m/ and /n/, /ŋ/ is rarer.
Only half of the 469 languages surveyed in Anderson (2008) had a velar nasal
phoneme; as a further curiosity, a large proportion of them limits its occurrence to
the syllable coda. In many languages that do not have the velar nasal as a phoneme,
it occurs as an allophone of /n/ before velar consonant. An example of it used this
way is the English word ingredient, which can be pronounced as
either [ɪnˈɡriːdiənt] or [ɪŋˈɡriːdiənt].
A.2 Vowel
The vowel in English, specifically in Received Pronunciation (RP) consists
of 12 simple vowel phonemes and 8 diphthongs (Poole 1999: 60), the same
with General American (GA) (Ladefoged 1993: 31). The quality of the vowel
can be distinguished between lax (short) consist of 6 vowel phonemes and tense
(long) consist of 10 phonemes. The lax vowels are {/ɪ, e, æ, ʊ, ʌ, ɝ/} and the tense
vowels are {/i, eɪ, ɑ, ɔ, oʊ, u, ju, aɪ, aʊ, ɔɪ /} (Ladefoged 1993: 87). There is a
vowel known as schwa /ə/, used to designate vowels that have reduced vowel
quality or the vowel is unstressed during the realisation in a c on ne ct e d speech
whi ch wi l l be di scus sed furt her i n t he di scussi on section. Comparing
the number of phonemes and the quality of vowels, it is difficult for
Indonesian to pronounce or speak the English words since in Indonesian; there
are only six vowel phonemes and they do not have tense vowels since it is not
phonemic (Alip, 2016: 16).
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1. Distributional Constraints on Underlying Vowels
As indicated i n S2, Bantu phonology is highly sensitive to morphological
considerations. Meeusen (1967), for example, allows for the following vowels
in each of the indicated positions:
*i¸ *u¸ *i *u *e *o *a
first stem x x x x x x x
syllable x x x x x x x
final stem x x x x
vowel
elsewhere
As seen, the seven vowels of PB contrast in the first and last syllables of
a stem, but not in prefixes, extensions or stem-internal position, where only
four vowels contrast. In a few cases involving reduplication, the vowel *u ¸
appears in the first two syllables of a verb, e.g. *dud uhm- ‘rumble, thunder’,
*pu¸p u¸m- ‘boil up, boil over’. The root *táku ¸n- ‘chew’, on the other hand,
appears to be exceptional.
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sequences / -am-il-/ (positional-applicative) and / -am-ul - / (positional-
reversive tr.) are realized [imis-] and [-umun-]. In addition, a post-stem / a/
([ ´]) assimilates to a FV -i, and both post-stem / a/ and / i/ assimilate to a FV
-u (Fontaney 1980). The Punu case demonstrates two general properties of Bantu
vowel systems: (i) There are typically more contrasting underlying vowels in
the stem-initial syllable, and (ii) vowels in this position may be exempt from
reduction and assimilation processes that post-stem vowels undergo.
B. Supra-Segmental
Supra-segmental is the units of linguistic which operate above single sounds
(Alip, 2016: 16). The supra-segmental features consist of stress, rhythm, and
intonation (Collins and Mees, 2013:128) that will be explained further below.
Similarly, to Kurdish language, “English is the language of stress and
syllables, unlike Mandarin that is tonal” as Gilakjani (2012:121) has described.
Each of linking, intonation and stress may affect macro level of language; each is
described below in a brief way.
Linking is the way that the last syllable of word joins the first syllable of the
neighboring word. Intonation is described as the melody of the language. Word
stress is the focused part, which is the most meaningful part of the sentence.
B.1 Stress
When there is a word in English consists of more than one syllable or
known as polysyllabic, certain syllable will receive a higher degree of
prominence or stressed. Stress syllables are produced with a stronger eruption in
initiatory energy and the energy result in greater loudness (Giegerich, 1992: 179).
In addition, stress also phonemic in English that is to say that different stress will
produce different meaning. For example, the word pervert can have two meanings
one is a verb and one is a noun. If pronounced asˈpervert, where the stress is on
the first syllable, it means that the word is noun that has meaning of a person
whose behaviour deviates from what is acceptable especially in
sexual behaviour, while if the stress is on the second syllable, perˈvert, it turns
into verb
that has meaning of corrupt morally or by intemperance or sensuality. Thus, it is
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important to know when to stress certain syllable.
The guidelines on word stress combining the propositions of Collin and
Mees (2013: 132) and Giegerich (1992: 184) are: (1) for words consisting of two
or three syllables, the primary stress is on the first syllable but we have to
keep in mind that usually the verbs and adjectives are in final stress and (2) for
words consisting of longer words (four or more syllables), there is a tendency for
the antepenultimate syllable (third from last syllable) to have primary stress.
Stress could be assigned as the base brick of teaching pronunciation. It
means the emphasized syllable of a word during utterance. In the spoken language,
stress could be easily identified; such as volume force, pitch change, syllable
length, and body gestures of the speaker. Stress could show its importance through
three different levels:
Lexical level: the stress on the multi-syllabic words could be on one or more
syllables.
Sentential level: only the important words are stressed.
Contrastive stress: the words with important positions carry greater stress. As in
the sentence below, the stressed parts or words are capitalized: -THOMson cannot
RECEIVE the LETters from the STUDent.
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consist of nouns, main verbs, adjectives, and most adverbs while function words
that consist of articles, auxiliary verbs, verb be, prepositions, pronouns, and
conjunctions left unstressed with few exceptions such as demonstratives and wh-
words. For example, in Giegerich (1992: 259), ˈThis is the ˈhouse that ˈJack ˈbuilt
comprises seven words as well as seven syllables where three words are content
words while the rest are function words.
The stress should fall on those three words (house, Jack, and built) but
since this is demonstratives, it should be stressed which makes it has four
stressed syllables. Between the stressed syllables, there is timing unit known as
foot. Time unit to pronounce ˈThis is the, ˈhouse that, ˈJack, and ˈbuilt is roughly
equal due to the nature of English as stress-timed language. Thus, this phrase has
four feet; the first consist of three syllables, the second two, and the last two
have one. This guideline is really useful to analyse English that written in
traditional manner (like rhyming couplets and iambic pentameter) poetry later.
B.3 Intonation
Intonation is the pitch movement of speaker’s voice during an utterance.
Unlike Mandarin that considered being tonal language i.e., the different tone will
produce different meaning, English does not use intonation to differentiate
meaning but rather to use it as a supra-segmental feature.
In any utterance, there will be intonation group where certain syllable that
has a marked change in pitch, which highlights that certain syllable or make the
syllable prominence by uttered it longer and louder. That prominence syllable is
known as the nucleus intonation and it is considered to be an essential component
of intonation group. The possible tones carried by the nucleus are fall (⸌), rises
(⸌), fall-rise (˅), and rise-fall (^). As a supra-segmental feature, intonation has four
functions namely the focusing, attitudinal, grammatical, and discourse (Collins and
Mess, 2013). Focusing is a speaker who focuses on the most significant information
by mean of the location of the nucleus.
For e x a m p l e , J a m e s adored h i s g o r g e o u s new m o t o r b i k e .
The m o s t significant information here is the new motorbike thus, it uttered longer
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and louder. Attitudinal is about a speaker who imposes an attitude on top of the
bare semantic content of what being said. For a fall-rise (˅) tone, it implies doubt,
correction, reservation, and appealing to the listener to consider while for a rise-fall
(^) tone, it implies impressed, arrogant, confident, self-satisfied, mocking, and
putting down. Grammatical function is about speaker distinguishing certain
syntactic relationship for example statement vs question like You’re are going to
⸌Malaysia. vs You’re are going to ⸌Malaysia? Discourse is about the
organization of conversation between two or more speakers. The nucleus tone in
the discourse can be divided into two the falling tones that suggest finality and
unloading of information and rising tones that indicate non-finality and
information.
Intonation has a crucial role in the speakers’ conversation, which make
meanings. There are three main approaches in intonation. Grammatical approach
relates intonation to grammatical section. Discourse approach emphasizes the
intention of the speakers in discourse.
In his work, Clennell (1997:124) explained intonation as five major levels;
Rise, Fall, Rise-Fall, Fall-Rise, and level (neutral). Furthermore, Murphy
(2002:133) explained that body movement may closely affect the intonation and
pronunciation, and mentioned that the movement might affect the rhythm, because
focusing on movement could help develop stress and rhythm awareness.
Changing meaning effectively is the vital role of speaker whether s/he is
Native Speaker (NS) or Non-Native Speaker (NNS). Moreover, speakers with good
pronunciation and intonation might continue discussions (conversations) much
easier (Burns, 2003:45). According to Burns, these speakers could achieve
intelligibility, comprehensibility, and interpretability even with low accuracy of
vocabulary and grammar. By contrast, Coniam (2002:36), Gilakjani (2012:121),
and Seferoglu (2005:305) explained segmental level of pronunciation as both
vowels and consonants, with their clusters.
Factors Affect Pronunciation
1. Attitude, motivation, and exposure: Both Celce-Murcia, et al.
(1996:320) and Gilakjani (2012:122) state that, motivated students who
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are concerned about the target pronunciation could achieve a better
pronunciation among EFS. The idea can be supported by the study of
Suter (1976:235) on the university students. The more interaction the
student has, the more opportunities have to practice and use the
language.
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develop the learner and through the different micro and macro levels of
a native-like pronunciation could be achieved (Gilakjani, 2012:124).
4. The curriculum and course materials are the most important factors to
develop pronunciation. The class should be student-centeredness.
Moreover, the students` pronunciation problems should be identified
learners about their mistakes. This could be done through focusing on
the word stress, pitch, and intonation. Furthermore, students should be
motivated to interact more and socialize more with NS. As it is indicated,
pronunciation is considered as one of the most difficult part of the
language for EFL, even pronunciation is the least favourite topic for
students. Pronunciation should be viewed in the same level of syntax and
grammar, because it is an important issue in communicative competence.
Moreover, the teacher should be helper rather than feedback giver, to
help learners achieve what they have tried for.
C. Methods
The second part aims to identify the main and minor problems of students in
pronunciation. In addition, identify the factors that underlie their problems and
the improvement they have experienced since they began studying at the
Indonesian University of Education English Department.
First, students were asked whether native or non-native English teachers had
taught them. The results have revealed that, all students are taught by non-native
teachers. Second, (% 100) students attend general and higher (public) secondary
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schools; and their subjects are taught fully locally. The results have revealed that
all students grew up in a non-native environment, which was one of the factors
behind students' problems in their pronunciation because they could not practice
their spoken English adequately in practical situations. This is similar to the
findings of Glachon (1991: 22), Celce-Murcia, et al. (1996: 221), and Gilakjani
(2012: 125) which describe the role of the environment and motivation in the
smooth running of students.
In addition, students have been asked to indicate how many hours / weeks.
As a result, students have fewer opportunities to practice their English in the
native environment and communicate with native speakers. As a result, they will
face more difficulties in their pronunciation during speaking.
Concluded that each "pitch" and "Intonation" is their main problem due to
lack of adequate practice. A studies by Celce-Murcia et al., (1966: 44), Pei (1966:
120), and Burns (2003: 75) explain the situation. It is believed that NNS usually
pay more attention to one component of language, such as grammar or
vocabulary, and neglect their pronunciation. In addition, links and assimilation
are assigned as their own secondary problem. Furthermore, each intrusion and
elimination are recorded as their little problem. However, through a variety of
student choices Different results might be obtained, while these are approximate
results. That the reason is clear; their weak foundation can be a factor. It will be
like that mentioned recently, the main and minor problem of students is due not
just one factor; education system and non-native environment games important
role. Factors such as the use of local language in the classroom and few
opportunities to practice language are obstacles for students to do achieve better
pronunciation. Student mistakes in the use of English Language is caused by the
absence of such opportunities.
E. Conclusion
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can achieve better pronunciation. The subject of pronunciation must be seen at
the same level as other subjects because this is an important topic in
communicative competence.
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