The L2 acquisition of the General American tap by Romanian learners of English
The L2 acquisition of the General American tap by Romanian learners of English

Summary/Abstract: The current research is concerned with providing an acoustic investigation of the General American tap produced by Romanian learners of English. The phonetic evidence obtained throughout the experiment conducted is made use of with the view to validating the theoretical framework of Speech Learning Model (Flege 1987). Thus, the paper is aimed at proving that Romanians assimilate the target phonemes under consideration to those similar categories existing in their mother tongue. Furthermore, the article also deals with the role the register factor plays in Second Language Phonology by invalidating Trudgill’s view (2002). Unlike Trudgill’s findings (2002), the current results illustrate that the Romanian informants’ production is constant across three types of tests irrespective of their formality. Basically the collection and interpretation of the corpora are entirely our contribution to the paper which also addresses pedagogical implications. Back to the practical level regarding pedagogical implications, it is widely-acknowledged in the literature that good pronunciation teaching is based on the knowledge of the systems and structures of both the source language and the target language. From our teaching experience, and from the spectrographic analysis we interpreted throughout this paper, we can safely conclude that there is difficulty in establishing extra phonemes for the target language.

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