The acquisition of voiceless stops in the interlanguage of second language learners of English and Spanish

Elicitation Materials. Subjects were given the same set of disyllabic real words in both English and Spanish in carrier phrases, which made the tokens closer to natural speech. This maintained control and comparability of the segments in the same environment, since vowel height and syllabic stress are known to affect aspiration (Keating, 1983). The English carrier phrase was "Say the word ___again," and the Spanish carrier phrase was "Diga la palabra ___otra vez." The tokens were limited to wordinitial voiceless stops, in all three places of articulation (labial, dental-alveolar, and velar) in a stressed syllable followed by a low back vowel. This paper presents the preliminary results from work in progress of a paired study of the acquisition of voiceless stops by Spanish speakers learning English and American English speakers learning Spanish. For this study the hypothesis was that the American speakers would have no difficulty suppressing the aspiration in Spanish unaspirated stops; the Spanish speakers would have difficulty acquiring the aspiration necessary for English voiceless stops, according to Eckman's Markedness Differential Hypothesis. The null hypothesis was proved. The results also reveal that a simple report of means will not distinguish the speakers and the respective language learning situation; measurements must also include the range of acceptability of VOT for phonetic segments. English Spanish #_a p posit 'propose' pago 'payment' t toddy 'type of drink' taza 'cup' k copper 'red metal' cada 'each, every'