In what ways does phonological transfer affects Spanish learners in Research Paper

In what ways does phonological transfer affects Spanish learners in the learning of English - Research Paper Example The critical analysis of the articles will explain phonological transfer in the sense of vowel transfers. The other part of the work will make an analysis and recommendations on phonological transfer and their impacts with the two extremes of language. The mistakes of Spanish students in terms of phonology and morphology of language will be analyzed real context. The analysis will integrate the analysis of influencing factors and how they affect the learning of the new language with reiteration being made on English learners as the second language. A conclusion will furnish the readers with my final stand on the issue of phonological transfer with respect to vowel transfer. The study further shows the interaction between bilingualism, vowel contrasts, and novel words. Bilingual participants had greater difficulty with the certainty of vowel contrasts that were contained in learners words, whereas native English participants had no significant difficulty with vowel contrasts in either real or novel words. The main variables that affected the bilingual participants’ in the process of phonological transfer were the age of acquisition of English, the report of problems in communication in English, and the overall percentage of time that was devoted to communication and learning in English. INTRODUCTION A number of previous studies have shown that phonological transfers have a vast impact when it comes to the learning of a language as the second language. The impacts have been observed when it comes to the experience of both the adults in production and perception of L2 sounds. Non-native speakers of language accuracy of pronouncing the vowels are inversely related to their age as opposed to their accuracy in pronouncing the consonants. Flege (1991b) found out in one of his studies that the non-native Spanish speakers who went to the US produced English vowels in an intended manner more often than those who went to the US as adults who produced the vowels in a more or less non-intended manner. There was a less spectral overlap between adjacent between the adjacent vowels as spoken by the early bilinguals as compared to those from the late bilinguals (Garcia Perez, 2003). Furthermore, there is the other impact of phonological transfer in terms of the vowel production accuracy as they vary among the individuals who began speaking the language when they are adults. Flege (199a) found out that English spoken by students with mild accents were more intelligible than that spoken by students with strong foreign accents. This is despite the fact that the basis of the strong accent with respect to vowel production differences still remaining unknown. There are questions raised though of whether the improvement in vowel production in adults occur naturally when one is exposed to L2 or it needs some special talents. The methodology for the findings above was conducted on ten Spanish speakers and having no other language acquired in the period of t he research at level 400 or at far the university level. The students were recruited at their respective English classes across the universities of the US states. The students were generally from the same state and were between 20-23 years of age. The average number of years that the students had studied English was 7.8 with the greatest having studied for 12 years and the least 4 years (Kuhl & Iverson, 1995). A greater percentage of about 60% and above had done the studies of the language for more than 7 years including how vowels move concerning the experience of the speaker with English language. This