This review article evaluates the intersection of the content of two recent anthologies in second language (L2) phonology. One of the books lays out both the methodological context and theoretical underpinnings of the field, whereas the other volume reports 11 empirical studies on the L2 acquisition of several aspects of pronunciation by adult…

Reports on research related to phonemic contrasts in the learning of second language pronunciation. Identifies three interesting learning situations that involve the target language's having different phonemic contrasts from the native language. (Author/VWL)

It is argued that typological markedness rather than sonority distance per se better explains second-language learners' knowledge of English clusters in syllable onsets. Further, markedness alone suffices to account for the observed interlanguage patterns. (Contains 19 references.) (Author/LB)

This article surveys the development of second language (L2) phonology over the last 40-50 years. Research in this area has grown from analyzing learners' errors in terms of Contrastive Analysis to proposals explaining L2 sound patterns in terms of constraints on interlanguage grammar. Although native language transfer has endured as one source of…