Research supported by a grant from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. (RS)

Four papers report on phonetic differences between Finnish and English, with pedagogical implications for teaching English as a second language. "The English /ptk/-/bdg/ Distinction: Data and Discussion" by Kari Suomi is a survey of recent work on the phonetic parameters of the fortis/lenis distinction. The distinction…

In this paper, the author raises the question of exactly which information is of fundamental importance in the construction of phonological tasks in a course in a foreign language. He attempts to indicate an answer with respect to a particular problem encountered by native speakers of Japanese and Russian in learning English: substitution of…

This report deals with sporadic observations on the glottal stop in the English spoken by Finns. The data were collected in connection with two separate studies. An attempt is made to give a description of the factors which may explain the occurrence of glottalization and to outline the method by which the phenomenon will be approached in greater…

It is well known to anyone involved in teaching English to Finnish students that it is difficult for Finns to distinguish between English /ptk/ and /bdg/. This second volume in a series on a Finnish-English contrastive project reports on a study which attempted to obtain more concrete knowledge about the ability of speakers of Finnish to use the…

Since 1971 the approach adopted in the teaching of English phonetics in Denmark has been a contrastive one. In this paper it is argued that although the original contrastive hypothesis (Lado 1957) has to be modified and weakened, a contrastive approach is highly useful in learning and teaching the pronunciation of a foreign language. Selected…

An investigation of instances of phonological contact between Hungarian and American English concerns the perception and production of English interdental fricatives and English stops, in a representative selection of contexts, by native speakers of Hungarian. Implications of structural differences between the stop and fricative subsystems of the…

This study identified two types of interference between Hungarian and English: phonetic and phonological interference. Four native speakers of Hungarian who are second language speakers of English read a passage containing a wide variety of sounds in different phonological environments. A set of rules mapping American English onto…

The present study deals with two language skills, listening and speaking, and it is limited to single consonant phonemes only. The purpose is to try to find answers to the following problems: (1) Which Finnish consonants are given as substitutes for English consonants by Finnish pupils who have no previous (or practically no previous) knowledge of…