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

Marie Fellbaum

Sat. 2:00-3:40 A

This paper will present the results of a preliminary study of a much larger study of the acquisition of aspirated voiceless stops by Spanish speakers learning English, and American English speakers learning to deaspirate voiceless stops in Spanish. The speech of sixteen subjects, eight from each native language divided evenly according to sex are analyzed. The Spanish tokens of the voiceless stops tested were presented in word initial and word medial stressed position, enclosed by a preceding and/or following low vowel: #Ca or aCa. The English tokens were close approximates, but vary due to stress conditions and dialect variability; nonetheless, in all tokens the consonants are preceded and/or followed by non-high vowels. All tokens were real disyllabic words of either Spanish or English.

The results indicate that it is easier for Spanish speakers to learn to aspirate than for the Americans to deaspirate voiceless stops. Although the dental stop in Spanish is the most difficult for the Americans to acquire, the Spanish speakers acquired aspiration in English equally across the stops. Variation in the results seem to be correlated with the frequency facts of the consonants and/or allophonic processes of each respective language. In Spanish, the dental and velar stops are equally distributed, with the labial stop least frequent (Delattre, 1965). In American English, the dental stop /t/ is the most frequent consonant, not only of the three respective stops but also in the language (Kucera & Francis, 1967). Discussion will focus on the language specific frequency facts of the native language as significantly correlated with the interference and variation in the acquisition of a second language. The need for frequency counts based exclusively on oral speech samples for oral production research will also be addressed.

Different spectrographic measurements of VOT, including measurements of pauses before the aspirated segment, rate of speech, and need to establish ranges of aspiration in the respective languages in order to accurately describe interlanguage variation will also be examined.

References

Delattre, Pierre. 1965. Comparing the Phonetic Features of English, French, German and Spanish: An Interim Report. Heidelberg: Julius Groos Verlag.

Kucera, Henry and W. Nelson Francis. 1967. Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English. Providence, RI: Brown University Press.