Variation in boundary consonant deletion among selected male and female undergraduates of University of Nigeria

Abstract

This study investigates variations in boundary /t/ consonant deletions in
English among young educated Nigerians in connected speeches. Thirty
students comprising of fifteen males and fifteen females in their third and
final years, from the Department of English and Literary Studies at the
University of Nigeria, Nigeria, participated in this study. Recordings were
made of their t-deletions in selected phonetic tokens in connected speeches.
All /t/ consonant deletions produced at word and morpheme boundaries in the
given sentences for the study were identified and analysed perceptually.
Labov’s Variationist theory was adopted as the theoretical framework. The
Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) software was used for the t-test
(Independent Sample Test) analysis to determine the significant differences
in the realisation of boundary /t/ consonants between the male and female
genders. With the level of significance at 0.05, the /t/ deletion in the male
participants in connected speeches was more significant than that of their
female counterparts.