Segmental repair and interactional intelligibility: The relationship between consonant deletion, consonant insertion, and pronunciation intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca in Japan

• Intelligible pronunciation depends on reaction of the interlocutor.
• Unintelligible pronunciation depends on the reaction of the interlocutor.
• Segmental repair is the engine of intelligible pronunciation.
• English as a Lingua Franca is a description of repair in English.

This is a qualitative study of the relationship between consonant deletion, consonant insertion, and the pragmatic strategies that maintain mutual intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca (hereafter, ELF) interactions among university and exchange students at a Japanese university (Jenkins, 2000, Matsumoto, 2011 and O’Neal, 2015). Some ELF research claims that consonant deletion attenuates mutual intelligibility in ELF interactions, especially if the consonant deletion occurs in word-initial and word-medial consonant clusters or in consonant clusters in syllable onsets and codas (Jenkins, 2000, Jenkins, 2007 and Deterding, 2013). This study assesses the effect of consonant deletion and consonant insertion on the mutual intelligibility of pronunciation in ELF interactions in Japan. Using conversation analytic methodology to examine a corpus of miscommunications among ELF speakers at a Japanese university, within which miscommunications are defined as repair sequences, this study claims that consonant deletion can attenuate mutual intelligibility, and that the insertion of a deleted consonant into a word can help restore mutual intelligibility. Furthermore, this is true regardless of deviance from or approximation to a native speaker pronunciation standard. This study concludes that segmental repair is an effective strategy with which English speakers can maintain mutual intelligibility.