Volume 44, Issue 4

The simultaneous presence in a learner's grammar of two features that should be mutually exclusive (optionality) typifies second language acquisition. But generative approaches have no good means of accommodating the phenomenon. The paper proposes one approach, based on Truscott and Sharwood Smith's (2004) MOGUL framework. In this framework, development involves items being written in the lexicon during processing, in accordance with UG principles embodied in the processors, and their resting activation levels gradually rising as a consequence of repeated use. Stored items compete with one another for inclusion in the representations constructed during processing, with success based on resting levels plus demands of the current processing task. Optionality occurs when two rival items coexist and neither has yet achieved a resting level at which it consistently triumphs over the other. The account is applied to various cases of optionality in second language acquisition.

This article discusses the strategies used by Cantonese ESL learners to cope with their problems in pronouncing English initial consonant clusters. A small-scale research study was carried out with six secondary and six university students in Hong Kong, who were asked to perform four speech tasks: the reading of a word list, the description of a picture list, the reading of three passages, and a conversational interview. The participants' speech was recorded using a high-quality mini-disk recorder and transcribed by two raters. The results of the study showed that deletion and substitution were commonly used by the learners, yet vowel epenthesis was practically non-existent. Certain segments, such as liquids, were also found to be more difficult than other segments in the same onset. It is argued that the findings of the study have both theoretical and pedagogical significance.

The current emphasis in second language teaching lies in the achievement of communicative effectiveness. In line with this approach, pronunciation training is nowadays geared towards helping learners avoid serious pronunciation errors, rather than eradicating the finest traces of foreign accent. However, to devise optimal pronunciation training programmes, systematic information on these pronunciation problems is needed, especially in the case of the development of Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training systems. The research reported on in this paper is aimed at obtaining systematic information on segmental pronunciation errors made by learners of Dutch with different mother tongues. In particular, we aimed at identifying errors that are frequent, perceptually salient, persistent, and potentially hampering to communication. To achieve this goal we conducted analyses on different corpora of speech produced by L2 learners under different conditions. This resulted in a robust inventory of pronunciation errors that can be used for designing efficient pronunciation training programs.