The Interference of Southern Min in Lugang Students‘ English Pronunciation 戴孜妤 (2000) M98C0103 黃俐雯

1.Analyzed the subjects ’ questionnaires. 2.Analyzed all the phonemes according to their percentage of erroneous pronunciations. 3.Analyzed the six types of the subjects ’ pronunciation errors. 4.Discussed each phoneme in three aspects: its error rate in different position, its order of difficulty, and common substitutes. 5. Data analysis

Type A Type A phonemes refer to those English sounds which have similar counterparts in LSM. The results reveal except, this type of phonemes are easy for the subjects. 5. Data analysis

Type B Type B phonemes refer to those English sounds which are absent in LSM. The majority of the subjects had trouble with these new phonemes, especially. 5. Data analysis

Type C Each of the type C phonemes is contained as an allophone of a single LSM phonemes. The results in the study suggest that many subjects cannot contrast the four pairs:, which are treated as non-contrastive because no phonological contrasts exist for these sounds in LSM. 5. Data analysis

Type D Type D phoneme only contains /l/, which can be realized as [l] and [ ] in English. However, the LSM //l// has only one allophone: the light [l], which restricted to word-initial position. Thus, the dark [ ] in English brings a great trouble for the subjects. 5. Data analysis

Type E Type E phoneme refers to the English sound which have allophones similar to allophones of more than one LSM phoneme. This type of sounds is not difficult for Lugang students. 5. Data analysis

Distributional errors appear in consonant clusters, vowel consonant combination, and complex syllables. Distributional Errors

Consonant clusters: Medial /-gr-/ hungry Final /-dz/ friends /-pt/ helped /-kt/ cooked /-st/ danced, fast /-ps/ envelops /-ts/ parents, that ’ s, classmates /-lk/ milk /-gry/ hungry /-nt/ don ’ t Initial /tr-/ train /str-/ street /gr-/ grownups / -/ three /bl-/ blocks /kl-/ class /sp-/ speak /cr-/ Christmas /st-/ store, steak /sk-/ school

Distributional Errors Poly-syllabic words a. restaurant b. delicious c. children d. grownups CVC combination a. many → b. name → c. movie → d. train e. room

Distributional Errors Different phonotactic constraints in English and Lugang Southern Min are also the main factors which cause great trouble for the subjects. The position of a sound within a word usually determines whether speakers have difficulty in pronouncing it.

6. Conclusion First language interference accounted for 86.14% of the subjects ’ errors The developmental process accounted for 10.08%. The last errors belonged to performance mistake.

6. Conclusion Language transfer effects did occur, but not in the classical CA (Contrastive Analysis) absolute "all or nothing" fashion. The result confirmed the evidence in interlanguage phonology that some sounds and rules often caused interference while others seldom did.

6. Conclusion The phonological system of Lugang Southern Min was different from that of English. Some English phonemes did not have their counterparts in Lugang Southern Min and were hard to learn, such as /T, Z, D, Î, Q/. Others resembled their Lugang Southern Min counterparts but were not identical to them in pronunciation and thus caused confusion, such as /e, i, u, o/. The different phonotactic constraints also resulted in Lugang students ’ difficulty, such as consonant clusters, CVC syllables, and poly-syllabic words.