A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ENGLISH/IGBO SYLLABIC STRUCTURES

Abstract

Igbo native speakers who learn English as a second language (L2) most of the time encounter perennial difficulties in mastering the syllabic structure, stress pattern and correctly articulating the English lexical words, and the syntactical structures. Research has shown that these difficulties are as a result of the differences between the phonological structures of the English language (L1) and the Igbo language (L2) which, in turn, affects the L2 learner’s communicative competence in the English language. A comparative study of a language investigates two or more languages in order to compare their structures or other linguistic features, to show whether they are similar or different. This paper, therefore, examines the syllabic structures of the two languages, English and Igbo respectively. It also assesses stress/tonal patterning in lexical words and connected speech. Contrastive Analysis theory by Robert Lado (1957) and CV phonology by Kahn (1980) were adopted for the work.