20 Feb 2001

Susana M Cortes Pomacondor

This piece of research aims at investigating the acquisition of English sounds by Catalan speakers from Barcelona and from Majorca. Specifically, it analyses the production and perception of two English phonemes: the voiced labiodental fricative and the voiced dental fricative. The voiced labiodental fricative was studied due to the presence of this sound as a phoneme in Majorcan Catalan and as a minor phonetic detail in Central Catalan (Catalan spoken in Barcelona.) The voiced dental fricative, in turn, was chosen because it is a phoneme in English whereas it is an allophone of the voiced dental stop in intervocalic position in both Catalan dialects. The two segments were investigated in intervocalic position ( post +continuant position) to study the effects of the L1 sounds on their acquisition.

Two test were implemented in this project: a production and a perception test. The production test consisted of different tasks to check subjects' performance across different speech styles. An identification test was carried out to analyse the relation between production and perception.

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