The two papers in this booklet comprise part of the research in the Hungarian-English Contrastive Linguistics Project, which is concerned with investigating the differences and similarities between the two languages with implications for second language acquisition. The first paper compares the obstruent clusters in English and Hungarian,…

Describes research on decoding and reading strategies involving three six-year-old migrant children learning to read in French. (AM)

Help young students master concepts of print, phonemic awareness, and alphabet knowledge--the key predictors of early literacy success and school readiness. This resource will show what children need to know about print in order to become successful readers, how to connect children's development with learning about print, and how to provide a…

Argues that most pronunciation problems encountered by Cantonese learners of English may be adequately accounted for by contrastive differences. The phonological differences between the two languages are examined, ranging from their phoneme inventories, the characteristics of the phonemes, the distributions of the phoneme syllable structure, to…

There is broad agreement as to many of the segmental features of the Hong Kong accent of English: neutralisation of vowels which contrast in Standard Southern British English or General American, non-release of final stops, simplification of consonant clusters and devoicing of coda consonants. However, while it is apparent that there is no reason…

Previous studies have suggested that nonnative (L2) linguistic sounds are accommodated to native language (L1) phonemic categories. However, this conclusion may be compromised by the use of explicit discrimination tests. The present study provides an implicit measure of L2 phoneme discrimination in early bilinguals (Catalan and Spanish).…

The importance of training second language learners in the patterns of occurrence of certain phonemes is discussed, focusing on the use of spelling as a primary predictor of pronunciation. Four different pronunciations of "ng" in English (as in "engaging, singer, changing, dangle") are used to illustrate this principle. A review of pronunciation…

Two experiments investigated the relationship between Spanish phonology and Spanish second-language (L2) learners' spelling success. Specifically, they examined: (1) differences in proportions of initial, middle, and final consonants spelled correctly by L2 learners; (2) differences in proportions of initial, middle, and final vowels spelled…

In the hope of filling in a missing link for experimental psychologists' research on reading, this paper provides a general review of research on the issue of orthography and its relation to reading. The traditional classification of logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic modes are examined to see how much orthographic variations affect the…

This research is an analysis of the French and Spanish phonological, phonetic, and graphemic systems. A contrastive analysis is used to show the differences that can create problems to the Spanish speaker learning French. For the benefit of Spanish speakers, all of the materials included have been prepared in Spanish. The first chapter defines the…

Although standard descriptions of spoken Brazilian Portuguese assign separate allophones to both /1/ and /u/ in utterance-final position after a vowel, it has been observed that in rapid speech native speakers articulate /l/ and /u/ in this position so that they are indistinguishable to the average speaker. To answer questions about the possible…

A Test of Spanish Word Features was developed to determine if Spanish orthography contains graphophonemic features similar to English. Test administrations to bilingual children in grades 1-5 found that spelling features in Spanish were internally consistent (reliable) but varied little in complexity compared to English. There was little evidence…

Investigates the acquisition of selected English short and long vowel spellings by German learners of English in order to answer the questions: who acquires the short and long vowel spellings (a,e,i), and when and what governs their order of acquisition? Statistical data is included. (Author/OD)

Aims to heighten teacher awareness of the semantic, syntactic, and phoneme-grapheme transfer problems that Chinese students face. Provides teaching suggestions involving phonology, vocabulary, syntax, and morphology. Urges reading teachers to use the visual modality to help make the transfer to the English script system more successful. (RS)