Phonetic and Phonological Transfer

 

Phonetic and Phonological Transfer 

By/ Brwa R. Sharif

 

Abstract:

             This term project sheds a light on phonetic and phonological contrasts on some languages that influence on the acquisition of second and foreign languages. It is clear that second and foreign language learners have sometimes difficulties in pronunciation, like Kurdish, Persian, Arabic learners of English language because of Influences of their first languages. I will talk about phonetic and phonological differences, in which first language affect second or foreign language acquisition.

 

Native language influence

There are certain influences for acquisition second and foreign languages in this term project we will focus on phonetics, phonemes, segments, and supra segments.

 

1)   Phonetic differences

         A phonetic description is necessary since sounds in two languages often show different physical characteristics, including both acoustic characteristics (the pitch of sound) and articulatory characteristics (how mouth is widely open in producing a sound) (Odlin, 1997).

       Two languages frequently have sounds which may seem identical but which in fact are acoustically different, such as American English /d/ as compared to Saudi Arabian Arabic /d/. The duration of American English /d/ is shorter at the end than Saudi Arabian Arabic /d/. But Flege’s analysis (1980, as cited in Odlin, 1997) shows that learners can modify their production of sounds so that their production comes closer to the target language norms, for example, Saudi Arabian learners of English produce English /d/ but neither fully native like nor target like, it is in between.

 

2)   Phonemic differences

            A factor that influences inter-lingual identifications is the set of relations implicit in the phonemic system of a language. Scholes (1968, as cited in Odlin, 1997) has documented in his study that non-native English speakers are likely to categorize foreign language sounds largely in terms of the phonemic inventory of the native language. For example, there are notoriously different phonemes between /l/ and /r/ in English language but there is not phonemic distinction between them in Japanese and Korean languages, therefore they have difficulties to pronounce them correctly.

          According to Keshavarz (2012) in Persian language / θ/ and / ð/ are not present, as a result Persian-speaking learners of English have difficulties to pronounce them, and they may pronounce (think) as /tɪnk/ or (then) as /den/.

 

3)   Syllable types and consonant clusters

          At first it is better to know syllable, it is defined in Keshavarz 2012 as ‘is a unit of pronunciation typically larger than a single sound and smaller than a word’. Because types of syllables are also important in the acquisition of second and foreign language as well as consonant clusters. For example, in English language there are 18 different types of syllables, while in other languages are different such as Kurdish language in which there are only 6. therefore it would be difficult for Kurdish learners of English to pronounce all English syllable types, and Karimi (1994, as cited in Rahimpour, 2010) has documented that Kurdish language allow 2 consonants initially and 3 at the end, therefore whenever it is more than that it would be difficult for Kurdish-speaking learners of English. As Carlisle (2001, as cited by Keshavarz, 2012) has stated, the longer the onset or coda, the more marked the syllable is considered to be. Consequently, English syllable structure that allows up to three consonants word initially and up to four consonants in the final position is extremely difficult for Persian-speaking of English.

 Types of segmental errors

1)   Phonemic errors

           Phonemic errors can arise when the phonemic inventories of two languages differ. For example, many English speakers have difficulty to pronounce /x/ and often fail to distinguish minimal pairs such as /naxt/ and /nakt/, because it is not present in English.

           As Keshavarz (2012) states that some phonological errors are due to lack of certain target language phonemes in the learner’s mother tongue. And Rahimpour has documented that English phonemes /θ/and / ð/ are absent in Kurdish. Therefore Kurdish learners of English have difficulties to pronounce them correctly.

 

2)   Phonetic errors

        Phonetic errors involve cases of cross-linguistic equivalence at the phonemic but not the phonetic level. For example, the German uvular /r/ and the English retroflex /r/ are corresponding consonants in cognate forms such as German rar and English rare, their acoustic properties differ considerably. Moreover, speakers of American English are normally not accustomed to using the uvula, whereas speakers in many regions of Germany are. Therefore the /r/ sounds that English speakers are likely to produce will thus differ considerably from the target language consonant.

 

 

3)   Allophonic errors

        Allophonic errors can arise in cases of inter-lingual identifications of phonemes in two languages. For example, both English and German have a voiceless alveolar stop /t/, but Americans are liable to pronounce acoustically it as voiced /d/ when it occurs between vowels such as writer they pronounce it as wider. And American learners of German language they may produce voiced instead of voiceless, such as German bitter.

 

4)   Distributional errors

          Distributional errors can occur when there are distributional differences in the combination of sounds. For example, German has a phoneme /ts/ which is acoustically similar to the consonant cluster found at the end of English words such as /its/ and /bits/. Therefore speakers of English have no difficulty in pronouncing the German phoneme when it occurs at the end of words, as in sitz (seat), they do often have difficulty in pronouncing it at the beginning of words, as in zu (/tsu/, to). When there are distributional differences in the sounds of two languages, transfer errors may occur.

       Thus the position of a sound within a word or syllable can affect how easy a sound is to pronounce.

         As it has been earlier explained, because of the consonant clusters the Persian-speakers have difficulties to pronounce some of the syllable types, therefore one of the major sources of pronunciation errors of Iranian EFL learners is the complexity of consonant clusters, the occurrence of more than one consonant in the onset or coda of a syllable, especially in the initial position. This is because Persian does not allow initial consonant clusters while in English up to three consonants can occur syllable initially. As a result Persian-speakers of English automatically insert a vowel before or in between the initial consonant clusters (Keshavarz, 2012), for example they may pronounce school as /eskuːl/ or street as / seterit/.

 

 

5)   Spelling pronunciation of words

         One of the other phonological errors is the spelling pronunciation of words. That is, the learner tends to pronounce words as they are spelled. For example, wild /wɪld/, flood /flud/(Keshavarz, 2012).

 

6)   The problem of silent letters

         Another cause of pronunciation errors is the problem of silent letters, which is similar to the previous type. In English, certain letters are spelled but not pronounced. EFL learners since they are likely to pronounce these silent letters such as, bomb as /bɒmb/, calm as /kalm/, honest as /honest/ (Keshavarz, 2012).

 

Supra segmental patterns

       The influences on pronunciation frequently evident in suprasegmental contrasts involving stress, tone, rhythm, and other factors.

1)    Stress patterns

         Stress patterns are crucial in pronunciation since they affect syllables and the segments that constitute syllables, as seen in the stress alternation in English between certain nouns and verbs (Odlin, 1997).

Combine v. /kəmˈbaɪn/

Combine n. /ˈkɒm.baɪn/

           Therefore when non-native speakers do not use a stress pattern that is a norm in stress pattern, this can result in a total misperception by listeners (Cutler, 1984, as cited in Odlin, 1997). Bansal (1976, as cited in Odlin, 1997) argues that errors in stress are the most important cause of unintelligibility in Indians, misidentifications by listeners. For example, an Indian speaker for the word (division) may say/ˈdɪvɪʒ. ə n/ and a British speaker may perceive as /ˈriː.dʒ ə n/.

              For some words a change in the position of stress in Kurdish language results in a change either in the meaning of that word or a change in its grammatical status. berizî /bʌrˈzi/ here it means (height) as the stress is on the last syllable, while the stress it is on the first syllable such as, berizî /ˈbʌrzi/ means (you are tall)(Jacub, 1993, as cited in Rahimpour, 2011).

            Keshavarz (2012) states that students tend to transfer the phonological features of their native language to those of the target language. For example, in Persian stress is predominantly on the final syllable of words (e.g., sæ ndæ li ‘chair) while in English the position of word stress is not so predictable and it varies according to parts of speech and the number of syllables in a word. Therefore, Persian-speakers learners of English, in many cases, tend to transfer rules of stress in their MT to English words (e.g., putting primary stress on the final syllable of words such as dentist as /den.ˈtɪst/ and alphabet/æl.fə.ˈbet/ instead of the first syllable.

2)    Tone

           A tone is a pitch element or register added to a syllable to convey grammatical or lexical information (Loos, et al., 2012).

             In tone languages pitch levels have phonemic significance. For example, Mandarian Chinese syllable (Ma) represents (mother) when it is used with a high level tone and represents (horse) when it is used with a low rising tone. Therefore it appears to be true that speakers of tone languages encounter difficulties in learning another closely related tone language, Leung (1978, as cited in Odlin, 1997) notes that Cantonese speakers often have difficulties with Mandarin and that such difficulties are due in part to the tone system of the native language.

           Pitch in English does not signal phonemic distinctions as it does in Chinese, but it does convey important information about speakers’ attitudes and emotional states. A study by Rintell (1984, as cited in Odlin, 1997) suggests that speakers of Chinese have special difficulty in identifying the emotional states of speakers of English; in contrast to speakers of Spanish and Arabic.

          Intonation signals help to structure conversation by providing signals for opening and closings for the meaning of turns (Brazil, Coulthard, and Johns, 1980, as cited in Odlin, 1997).

            A similarity in suprasegmental patterns of two languages can give a learner important advantages in learning the syntax of the target language according to a study by Keller-Cohen (1979).

            A similarity or dissimilarity between native and target language intonation can affect production in other ways. Adams (1979) attributes much of the divergence of ESL speakers’ speech rhythms to the rhythmic systems in their native languages.

 

The cross-linguistic frequency of phonemes

            Languages tend to have a mix of sounds, some found in many languages, such has /i/, /u/ and /o/ all appeared in the phonemic inventories of over 250 languages out of 317, and some not so commonly found, such as a voiceless pharyngeal fricative / ħ/ in Kurdish that appeared in only 12 other languages (Mddison, 1984, as cited in Odlin, 1997). Any contrastive analysis is likely to predict that both sounds / ħ/ and /x/ will cause difficulty for English-speaking learners of Kurdish but the facts of cross-linguistic frequency suggest that / ħ/ will cause far more difficulty (Briere, 1968, as cited in Odlin, 1997).

 

Common phonological rules

               One rule that has proved to be especially interesting involves consonant devoicing. In devoicing, a voiced consonant becomes voiceless. In some languages certain consonants at the ends of words become voiceless, for instance in German the final consonant of Rad (‘wheel’) is pronounced the same as the final consonant in Rat (‘advice’). Whereas in English there is not any rule such as devoicing therefore according to Moulton (1926b, as cited in Odlin, 1997) English speakers have little difficulty, in learning to pronounce Rad and Rat identically.

             There is other evidence of the naturalness of the devoicing rule. Eckman (1981a, 1981b, as cited in Odlin, 1997) has documented cases of speakers of Cantonese and Spanish devoicing word final stops in English even though such a rule does not exist in either the native or target languages. For example, Cantonese speakers may pronounce pig like pick even though Cantonese does not have a devoicing rule.

 

Syllable structure

              Japanese speakers never devoice final consonants; thus, words such as pig were not pronounced like pick but instead often had a vowel added to create a second syllable as in /pigə /. Eckman attributes such errors to syllable structure typology- Japanese is one of many languages that allow very few consonants to occur at the end of a word.

             Greenberg’s analysis (as cited in Odlin, 1997) indicates that languages are more likely to have syllables ending in two voiceless consonants (e.g., /-ps/ as in tops) than to have syllables ending in two voiced consonants (e.g., /-bd/ as in rubbed).

Conclusion

                   The more the phonetic and phonological contrasts in first and second or foreign languages are, the more for the learners are difficult to learn second or foreign languages. Therefore some learners encounter some phonetic and phonological problems while they learn other languages.

 

References

Keshavarz, M. H. (2012). Contrastive Analysis & Error Analysis. Tahran: Rahnama Press.

Loos, E. E., Anderson, S., Dwight, H., Day, J., Jordan, P. C., & Wingate, J. D. (Eds.). (2012, April 23). What is tone? Retrieved from Glossary of linguistic terms: http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsTone.htm

Odlin, T. (1997). Language Transfer: Cross-linguistic influence in language learning (Sixth Printing ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rahimpour, M. (2011). A Phonological Contrastive Analysis of Kurdish and English. International Journal of English Linguistics, 10.