This theoretical study aims at raising awareness of the existence of lexical false friends (FFs) in English and Arabic as genetically unrelated languages. It also provides a general categorization for FFs from a semantic point of view. A sample of more than fifty FF pairs is examined by contrasting their form, pronunciation and meaning. The…

Previous research on pronunciation errors observed that the most frequently mispronounced English phonemes are word-initial consonants. The findings of the current study invalidate those observations by presenting the data analysis of 40 Turkish EFL learners' speech samples, which illustrates that segmental speech errors are position-independent…

The following work tries to analyze the possible fossilization errors of the students when acquiring a second foreign language. For this purpose, two languages have been chosen: maternal (Spanish) and foreign (English). In the present work we have examined the effects of the Spanish language and the English language when learning another language…

When learning English, learners might face a challenging task in mastering pronunciation due to differences in both languages such as sound-to-letter correspondence, size of phoneme inventory, allophonic realization of sounds, place and manner of articulation, among others. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to review both theoretical and…

Presents study involving university Spanish students testing predictive power of contrastive analysis in terms of accuracy of predicted hierarchy for persistence of phonological errors. Results show problems involving allophone use or nonuse are more persistent than those involving phoneme use or nonuse, and the degree of difficulty of a sound…

A classification of a number of common errors in English pronunciation committed by Bengali learners. (RM)

Error analysis has consistently neglected to give any treatment of the phonological aspects of non-native linguistic performance. Using Selinker's Interlanguage model as a starting-point, an attempt is made here to develop a descriptive apparatus capable of accounting for the phenomena of "foreign accents." The data of one such…

Analyzes observations of the pronunciation of French by 32 undergraduate students at the University of Ilorin (Nigeria). The phonological analysis includes: 1) sound variation; 2) terminal sound loss; 3) sound intrusion; 4) assimilation; and 5) liaison. Many factors appear to have affected performance, especially having had a Francophone teacher…

Discusses the amount of influence that a learner's native language has on the acquisition of a second language. Suggests that some important properties of a learner's interlanguage (IL) can be predicted, as shown by the different IL rules that Cantonese and Japanese use in dealing with English word-final voice contrasts. (Author/MES)

Types of hierarchies of pronunciation difficulty are discussed, and a hierarchy based on contrastive analysis plus informal observation is proposed. This hierarchy is less one of initial difficulty than of error persistence. One feature of this hierarchy is that, because of lesser learner awareness and very limited functional load, errors…

Native speakers of Egyptian Arabic make errors in their pronunciation of English that cannot always be accounted for by a contrastive analysis of Egyptian analysis of Egyptain Arabic and English. This study focuses on three types of errors in the pronunciation of voiced and voiceless "th" made by fluent speakers of English. These errors were noted…

Three essays are presented that deal with phonetic correction and that are intended specifically for Anglophones. They deal with the following topics: (1) methods and processes useful in phonetic correction with students called "false intermediates"; (2) a synthesis and a methodology of methods of phonetic correction of the "French R" with…

The comparatively small vowel inventory of Bantu languages leads young Bantu learners to produce "undifferentiations," so that, for example, the spoken forms of "hat,""hut,""heart" and "hurt" sound the same to a British ear. The two criteria for a non-native speaker's spoken performance are…

The most significant criterion for classifying spelling errors is whether the erroneous form yields the same pronunciation as the intended word. Five categories can be discerned: (1) non-identical pronunciation, non-existent English word; (2) non-identical pronunciation, confusion of existing words; (3) identical pronunciation, English spelling…

This paper discusses some theoretical aspects of contrastive phonetics. A fundamental problem in contrasting the sound structure of two languages is the question of equivalence between the two sound systems. There are four possible criteria: (1) similar spelling; (2) similar phonetic description and transcription; (3) use of phonological criteria;…