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Dissertation Information
| Title: | The Perception and Production of Interdental Fricatives in Second Language Acquisition | Add Dissertation |
| Author: | Kathleen Brannen | Update Dissertation |
| Email: | click here to access email | |
| Institution: | McGill University, Linguistics | |
| Completed in: | 2011 | |
| Linguistic Subfield(s): | Phonetics; Phonology; Language Acquisition; | |
| Director(s): |
Heather Goad |
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| Abstract: | This dissertation investigates the differential substitution of interdental fricatives ([θ,ð]) by learners of English as a second language. Differential substitution (or transfer) occurs when learners whose native language does not include the 'th'sounds, substitute different segments in their place, depending on the particular L1: [t,d], [s,z], or [f,v]. Throughout the past 50 years, various proposals have been forwarded to explain this phenomenon. The majority of these approaches have focused on structural differences within the contrastive phonemic systems of various languages. This thesis examines two languages and two dialects of the same language: Japanese, Russian, European French, and Québec French. Japanese and European French are known to substitute [s,z] in place of [θ,ð], while for Québec French and Russian, [t,d] are reported. Since European and Québec French arguably have the same phonemic inventory of obstruents, this thesis explores the function of non-contrastive phonetic information in interdental substitution, in both perception and production. It is hypothesized that perception underlies production, such that those errors observed in production will be the sounds that are apt to be perceptually associated with the target. Furthermore, it is considered that non-contrastive phonetic features play a determining role in segmental transfer. In particular, the feature STRIDENT is hypothesized to be key in the choice of interdental substitute. To account for how second language learners perceptually map target sounds to their internal representations, the Auditory Distance Model is developed and coupled with the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best 1995). A premise of the model is that the absence of features or particular combinations of features in the L1 grammar forces the L2 learner to choose from among the phonetically closest L1 sounds. Moreover, a feature's weight can be augmented if it stands in an enhancement relation with another feature. Thus cross-linguistic phonetic variation and the resulting diversity in feature weight is what determines differential substitution in perception and hence in production. These hypotheses are empirically verified in five studies. The first two, the AXB-1 and AXB-2 perception tasks, were designed to tap phonetic and phonemic processing in separate conditions to demonstrate that the observed patterns of differential substitution emerge in phonetic, but not phonemic processing. The third perception experiment, Picture Identification, examines phonemic processing. The final studies analyze production. The results of one, a Word Production task, are compared with the perception findings. The other involves a Spectrographic Analysis of the L1 coronal fricative [s] to determine the degree to which the feature STRIDENT is acoustically manifested for each of the languages. The results from these studies largely support a perceptual basis to differential substitution, and indicate the involvement of weighted phonetic features. The role of visual information in lexical representations and the possibility of task-induced bias are discussed in regards to other interdental substitutes in the data. The theoretical and empirical investigations in this dissertation elucidate our understanding of the complex issue of sound adaptation in second language acquisition. |
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