Data Sets

Brunei

ASEAN

Hong Kong + Malaysian — HK1 : 1211

S1 = Hong Kong male
S2 = Malaysian female

Context : S1 is discussing what he likes about Brunei: the absence of extreme temperatures.

S1 : ... because every time when i relocate you know. either really cold freezing cold

S2 : mm

S1 : or flaming hot

Intended Words : flaming

Heard as : fuming

Discussion : There is no [l] in flaming.

One might note that there is little evidence of an [r] in freezing either, but S2 has no problem with this word. One reason for this is that the collocation freezing cold is common, while flaming hot is less common – in the COCA data of American English (here), there are 197 tokens of freezing cold but just two of flaming hot. This illustrates that, within some contexts, the omission of a consonant may have little effect on intelligibility; but when there is more unexpected lexical usage, such non-standard pronunciation can have a greater effect.