It is about phonetic and phonological transfer, it was prepared as a homework for ELT MA students..

1. Phonetic and Phonological
Transfer

2. Phonetic differences
• A phonetic difference is necessary since sounds in two
languages often show different physical
characteristics, including both acoustic characteristics
and articulatory characteristics (Odlin).
• Two languages frequently have sounds which may
seem identical but which in fact are acoustically
different. American English /d/ and Saudi Arabian /d/
• Flege‟s analysis shows that learners can modify their
production of sounds.
American English /d/ Saudi Arabian Arabic
/d/

3. Phonemic differences
• Scholes 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 ( cf.
Liberman et al. 1957).
• English native speakers distinguish between /e/
and /æ/, while speakers of Russian and Greek do
not have them, whereas Persian has a phonemic
contrast between them.
• Phonemes /θ/ and /ð/ are present in English but
not in Kurdish (Rahimpour, 2011).

4. Types of segmental errors
• 1. Phonemic errors: some phonological errors
are due to lack of certain target language
phonemes in the learner‟s mother tongue.
English phonemes /I/, /θ/, and /ð/ do not exist
in Persian so they may pronounce
think /tInk/ (Keshavarz, 2012).
• Many native speakers of English have
difficulty in pronouncing German /x/ because
English doesn‟t have that phoneme so they
may mispronounce it.

5. 2. Phonetic errors
• Phonetic errors in Moulton‟s classification
involve cases of cross-linguistic equivalence at
the phonemic but not the phonetic level.
• German has uvular /r/ but English has
retroflex /r/ so they are corresponding
consonants in cognate forms but their acoustic
properties differ considerably (Odlin).

6. 3. Allophonic errors
• Allophonic errors can arise in cases of
interlingual identifications of phonemes in two
languages.
• Both English and German have a voiceless
alveolar stop /t/. But speakers of American
English when they pronounce (writer or
whiter) is acoustically quite similar to the
sound of /d/ so they may pronounce as (rider
or wider), and Americans learning German are
thus liable to use a voiced consonant between
vowels in words such as “bitter” (Odlin).

7. 4. Distributional errors
• Transfer errors may occur, when there are
distributional differences in the sounds of two
languages.
• One of the major sources of pronunciation errors
of Iranian EFL learners is the complexity of
consonant clusters, this is because Persian does
not allow initial consonant clusters.
school /esku:l/ (Keshavarz, 2012).

8. 5. Spelling pronunciation
• According to Keshavarz (2012) one of the
other phonological errors is the spelling
pronunciation of words, because the learners
tend to pronounce words as they are spelled.
• Wild /wIld/
• Flood / flud/

9. 6. The problem of silent letters
• In English certain letters are spelled but not
pronounced (Keshavarz, 2012).
honest /honest/
bomb /bomb/

10. Suprasegmental patterns
• The influence on pronunciation frequently
evident in suprasegmental contrasts involving
stress, tone, and other factors.
• 1. Stress: Stress patterns are crucial in
pronunciation since they affect syllables and
the segments that constitute syllables.
• COMbine n. comBINE v.

11. • Bansal (1976) argues that errors in stress are
the most important cause of unintelligibility in
Indians‟ misidentifications by listeners.
diVIsions DIvisions REgions
• 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 (Jacub, 1993).
• BARzȋ (you are tall) barZȊ (height)

12. 2. Tone
• In tone languages pitch levels have phonemic significance.
• Mandarian Chinese syllable (ma) represents mother when it
is used with a high level tone, and horse in a low rising
tone.
• A study by Rintell (1984) 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.
• Pitch in English does not signal phonemic distinctions.
• Intonational signals help to structure conversation by
providing signals for opening and closings for meaning of
turns (Brazil, Coulthard, and Johns 1980).

13. • A similarity in suprasegmental patterns of two
languages helps to learn the syntax of the target
language (Keller-Cohen 1979).
• Similarity or dissimilarity in two 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 effect of suprasegmental (or segmental) transfer
may often be relatively unimportant. When speaking
English, a German may „sound German‟ and a
Korean may „sound Korean‟ but they may still
succeed in communicating gracefully, fluently, and
accurately in most respects (Odlin)

14. The cross-linguistic frequency of
phonemes
• Languages tend to have a mix of sounds, some
found in many languages, such as /i/, /u/, and /o/
all appeared in the phonemic inventories of over
250 languages, and some rarely found such as a
voiceless pharyngeal fricative /ħ/ in Kurdish that
appeared in only 12 other languages Maddison,
1984)
• The facts of cross-linguistic frequency suggest
that /ħ/ will cause difficulty for English speaking
learners of Kurdish ( Briere 1968).

15. Common phonological rules
1. Devoicing: a voiced consonant becomes
voiceless.
• German (Rad) they pronounce it as (Rat).
German learners of English may have
difficulty to suppress the devoicing rule, while
English does not have it. They may pronounce
(nod) as (not)
2. There is no devoicing rule in native and target
language, but speakers of Cantonese and
Spanish devoice word final stops in English
(Eckman, 1981a). pig pick

16. Syllable Structure
• Japanese often had a vowel added to create a
second syllable as in pig [pigə]. Japanese is one
of many languages that allow very few
consonants to occur at the end of a word, so
Eckman attributes such errors to syllable structure
typology.
• Greenberg‟s analysis indicates that language are
more likely to have syllables ending in two
voiceless consonants (/-ps/ as in tops) than to
have syllables ending in two voiced consonants (/-
bd/ as in rubbed).

17. Native language influence is an
important factor in the acquisition of
target language phonetics and
phonology. (Odlin)

18. References
• Keshavarz, M. H. (2012). Contrastive Analysis & Error
Analysis. Tahran: Rahnama Press.
• Odlin, T. (n.d.). Language Transfer: Cross-linguistic
influence in language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
• Rahimpour, M. (2011). A Phonological Contrastive
Analysis of Kurdish and English. International Journal
of English Linguistics, 10.