L1 habits often tend to interfere with the process of learning a second language. The vowel habits of Arab learners of English are one such interference. Arabic orthography is such that certain vowels indicated by diacritics are often omitted, since an experienced reader of Arabic knows, by habit, the exact vowel sound in each phonetic…

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…

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…

This paper presents the results of an experiment designed to investigate some of the effects of bilingualism on perception. The subjects were Icelandic monolinguals and Icelandic-English bilinguals. The phonetic parameter under investigation was duration. The experiment was designed to test which of the following three hypotheses accurately…

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…