LEXICAL AMBIGUITY FACED BY NON-NATIVE LEARNERS LISTENING TO ENGLISH CONNECTED SPEECH

Ambiguity refers to the situation in which a word or a phrase can have more than one meaning. Generally speaking, some ambiguities occur in daily communication in which native and non-native speakers get confused to understand what exactly the speaker is referring to. Those are called lexical ambiguities in which the word has the same sound and the spelling, but it is still regarded as two or more different lexemes as it carries various unrelated meanings, a polysemous term, or homophonous term in which two words can have the same sound but different meanings and different spellings. However, the real problems are those faced by the non-native learners when listening to English native speakers, especially concerning the phonological variations that happen in speech production, which create ambiguity. This paper focuses on some lexico-semantic ambiguities caused by connected speech processes that occur naturally in spoken English. That means the ambiguity here is caused by the phonological modifications caused by combining two or more words while speaking, referred to as connected speech processes, resulting in some phonological variations in speech production that in some cases, the same word can be understood in two different ways due to the change that happened while pronouncing it adjacent to the next word. For example, the word ‘teen’ can be misinterpreted as ‘team’ when the /n/ is assimilated to a bilabial sound as in ‘They were more interested in teen books’. Here, we can get two meanings, ‘They were more interested in teen books’ and ‘They were more interested in team books’. As is the case with all other ambiguities, the solution will always be by providing more details as the meaning depends on the context of the ambiguous words. Therefore, if these are the potential causes of ambiguity to a native listener, they are also to be taken as potential ambiguities to non-native listeners as well. Consequently, if the EFL learners do not have the awareness to expect such ambiguities, they would probably misunderstand the message. However, if they are aware of such processes, they will have fewer comprehension difficulties. This paper suggests that a teacher of English as a foreign language should raise the EFL learners’ awareness of such processes and the possible ambiguities so as to avoid them.