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Academic Paper

Title:	THE ROLE OF NATIVE LANGUAGE PHONOLOGY IN THE PRODUCTION OF L2 CONTRASTS
Author:	Fred R. Eckman
Email:	click here to access email
Homepage:	http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/faculty/eckman.html
Institution:	University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Author:	Gregory K. Iverson
Email:	click here to access email
Homepage:	http://www.uwm.edu/~iverson
Institution:	University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Linguistic Field:	Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics
Abstract:	We present findings of an investigation into the acquisition of the English /s/–/ʃ/ contrast by native speakers of Korean and Japanese. Both of these languages have the phones [s] and [ʃ], and both languages exhibit a pattern—or motivate a rule—whereby /s/ is realized as [ʃ] before the vowel [i] and the glide [j]—that is, high front vocoids. The crucial difference, and the focus of this study, is that in Korean [s] and [ʃ] are allophones of /s/, whereas in Japanese the two sounds arguably instantiate different phonemes. We present production data showing that the differences in the functioning of [s] and [ʃ] in the second language learner’s native language have different consequences for the acquisition patterns and the error types produced in the learning of this contrast.

	This article appears in Studies in Second Language Acquisition Vol. 35, Issue 1, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST .

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