Yoon, Tae-Jin. 2020. Repair Strategies of Complex Onset by Spanish Learners of English in the Speech Accent Archive. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 26.2. 279-301.

This paper aims at analyzing strategies of adjusting non-permissible syllable structure by Spanish learners of English in the corpus of the Speech Accent Archive. Words exhibiting sC (where C stands for consonant) onset clusters in the elicitation paragraph were examined concerning repairs by 162 Spanish learners. Collocated words before the complex onset clusters were those ending with a vowel, an obstruent, or a voiceless alveolar fricative, which played different roles in modifying the illegal onsets, ranging from prosthesis even to deletion, which is rarely discussed in Spanish Interlanguage Phonology. Prosthesis is attested as the most frequent repair strategy, but with a much lower proportion than reported in earlier studies. A mixed effects logistic regression analysis suggests that the onset of age in English learning and the context of the preceding words best explain when prosthesis occurs.

Keywords: Prosthesis, Homorganic deletion, Repair of Syllable Structure, Spanish learners of English, Speech Accent Archive, Age of Onset