ON THE ACQUISITION OF THE ASPIRATED STOPS BY ROMANIAN LEARNERS OF ENGLISH
ON THE ACQUISITION OF THE ASPIRATED STOPS BY ROMANIAN LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

Summary/Abstract: The corpus of the current study will be extensively discussed in connection to the following phonological models pertaining to L2 learning: Markedness Theory (Eckman 1987), the theory of interlanguage (Selinker 1972), Flege’s Speech Learning Model (1986) and the categorisation of speech sounds (Gerrits 2001). The spectrographic analysis I employed to analyze the data clearly illustrates that aspiration stands for a marked phenomenon which poses great pronunciation difficulties to Romanian learners of English. The VOT values I measured in Praat are aimed at bringing essential phonetic evidence in favour of the phonological assumptions formulated within the theoretical frameworks mentioned above. In this vein of thought, the spectrographic analysis which provides the VOT values validates, or on the contrary, invalidates the soundness of the models under scrutiny.

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