PHONOLOGICAL INTERFERENCE AMONG IGBO SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH

ABSTRACT

Language as the major tool of communication for humans involves learning a second language after the acquisition of the first language at early childhood, this process has always been a problem for most people, as the stage of acquisition has passed, and the mind of the speaker has been overwhelmed by the structure of the first language, this hence bring about interference when the native speaker tries to speak a second language; this study hence is an attempt to carry out a contrastive analysis on the phonological interference among Igbo speakers of English. The aim of the study is to examine the ways in which the Igbo language affects the English of Igbo speakers The data for this study was collected through interview, data was drawn during interviewees running speeches. The interviewees were given series of academic materials to read, the materials were courses from Linguistics comprising of 10 pages each. During the researcher's discussion and interview with them, it was observed that there were lots of cases where their mother tongue (Igbo) interfered with their English. The contrastive analysis theory was employed in the observation of the interference in various words produced by informants, the data were presented according to the different interference observed, which include; substitution, deletion and insertion, successful analysis was carried out on the data collected, The analysis reveals that Igbo speakers encounter challenges in English pronunciation due to phonological interference. The distinct vowel and consonant sounds in Igbo contribute to pronunciation errors in English. Common instances of interference include difficulties in producing certain English sounds and the carryover of Igbo speech patterns to English.