Typological Universals and Intrinsic Universals on the L2 Acquisition of Consonant Clusters

This study is to examine if typological universals built upon primary languages are applicable to interlanguage data in SLA. Implicational universal is considered the classic example of a typological universal by Croft (2003). Thus, the Interlanguage Structural Conformity Hypothesis, which consists of two implicational universals proposed by Eckman (1991), were tested against data from an interlanguage. The interlanguage data reconfirms that syllable structure plays a key role in the Fricative-Stop Prinicple. However, the Fricative-Stop Principle is sensitive to the position which clusters occur in a syllable. This typological universal is only applicable to final consonant clusters only. The test results do not conform with the Resolvability Principle. The Resolvability Principle claims that if a language has a consonantal sequence of length m in either initial or final position, it also has at least one continuous subsequence of length m-1 in this same position. Taiwanese 3 speakers‟ interlanguage data show that they can produce a consonantal sequence of 3 [spr-], but fail to produce a consonantal sequence of 2 [bl-], which violates the proposed typological universal. Thus, intrinsic universals are proposed to explain the interlanguage data in this study, i.e. the position that a consonant cluster occurs in a 1 I am hesitating to use the word "acquisition", because this study is not a longitudinal study, and its scope is limited to the production form only. Although I think "production" is a more appropriate word to use here, however, in order to conform with the word choice by Eckman, I shall use “acquisition” instead of “production”. 2 acknowledgment to Aim for the Top University Plan, Ministry of Education, Taiwan, R.O.C. and anonymous reviewers of ROCLING2011. 3 Taiwanese is a South-Min variety of Chinese spoken in Taiwan. This language does not allow consonant clusters.