Perception and Production in the Acquisition of L2 Phonemic Contrasts
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper reports data from a pilot project that is part of an ongoing study investigating the second-language (L2) acquisition of phonemic contrasts. Our focus will be on the acquisition of the English /s/ /š/ contrast by native speakers of Japanese and Korean. These native language backgrounds were chosen because Japanese and Korean employ the sounds in question as allophones of the same phoneme, with [š] occurring before high front vowels, [s] elsewhere. The task of the L2 learner in this case is to acquire the contrast by suppressing the application of the native language (NL) allophonic rule in pronunciation of the target language (TL) words. Universal principles of phonology predict that learners will be able to suppress the application of the allophonic rule across a morpheme boundary only if they are also able to inhibit the rule from applying within morphemes. In other words, a learner will acquire the contrast in environments across morphemes only if that learner has acquired the contrast within morphemes. The purpose of this paper is to test this prediction in both the production and perception of the /s/ /š/ contrast by Japanese and Korean learners of English. The paper is structured as follows. The Background section sets the context for the study by briefly reviewing some of the literature on the relationship between perception and production of contrasts in second language acquisition (SLA), by illustrating the necessary phonological principles and constructs, and by stating the hypotheses underlying this pilot study. The Methodology section lays out the procedure used to elicit, record, transcribe and score the data. The next section describes the results of the study as they pertain to the hypotheses, which, in turn, is followed by a discussion of these results. The final section concludes the paper.
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