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Cantonese Speakers and the Acquisition of French Consonants
Author(s) -
Cichocki W.,
House A.B.,
Kinloch A.M.,
Lister A.C.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/0023-8333.49.s1.3
Subject(s) - markedness , interlanguage , linguistics , phonology , psychology , second language acquisition , problem of universals , grammar , linguistic universal , language acquisition , learnability , computer science , artificial intelligence , philosophy
This chapter reports the findings of research on the acquisition of French consonants by native speakers of Cantonese. The corpus is noteworthy because few studies have investigated this particular interlanguage. Indeed, although our knowledge of the phonology of French is rich, we know considerably less about Cantonese. As members of different language families, French and Cantonese display phonetic and phonological features that differ along various tiers of analysis; one of the important differences illustrated in this study is the [voice] feature. The principle guiding our research on Cantonese‐French interlanguage is the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH), which invokes notions of universal markedness to make predictions about which target language forms are more difficult to acquire than others. Although the fact that it provides testable hypotheses makes it an attractive framework, the MDH has its share of difficulties. We show that the MDH can explain several major patterns of difficulty, but that other errors found can be explained in terms of an interaction of language acquisition and markedness reversals. Our ongoing research on the interlanguage vocalic system suggests other interactions between the hypothesized markedness relations and language transfer facts. Noteworthy is the fact that the markedness relations have been established on the basis of typological, and not necessarily Universal Grammar, universals. The methodological issue of defining standards of acceptable/unacceptable responses in learning research continues to be problematic. A well‐defined and quantitative measure of difficulty is attractive for applications in language learning, yet continuous acoustic spaces such as vowels or prosodic features provide challenges to this goal. In this study, we develop a scale of difficulty of consonants in both initial and final positions. For consonants we use judgements of unimpeded understanding, and these prove to offer a workable approach.