15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Extra Final Consonants in the English of Hong Kong and Singapore

Jane Setter (1), David Deterding (2)

(1) University of Reading, UK
(2) National Institute of Education, Singapore

This paper focuses on the appearance of additional final consonants in the English of speakers from Hong Kong and Singapore. In the data examined, three types of sound added word finally are identified: alveolar fricative, which we label /s/, alveolar plosive, labelled /t/, and velar plosive, labelled /k/. Some of the occurrences of these sounds could be explained either as problems with plurals or spurious - ed suffixes. However, it was harder to account for some of the extra sounds. Two explanations were considered: the extra consonant may arise for articulatory reasons; or it may involve a kind of hypercorrection.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Setter, Jane / Deterding, David (2003): "Extra final consonants in the English of Hong Kong and Singapore", In ICPhS-15, 1875-1878.