English with a Latin Beat: Studies in Portuguese/Spanish  English Interphonology (Studies in Bilingualism)

Although it has long been recognized that second language pronunciation is strongly influenced by the native language, second language phonology has only become a recognized area of study during the last thirty years. While English has been the most frequent target language involved, the learners' L1s have varied greatly. This is the first collection to gather together studies involving English learners whose L1 is Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese, two closely-related languages with important phonological differences. The research covers vowel perception and production, syllable simplification strategies, word and compound stress, and vowel reduction. While the papers confirm the important role of the native language, they also shed light on the sometimes subtle and unexpected ways in which this variable interacts with universal markedness relationships to determine the formation of phonetic categories and their use in perception and production. These eleven carefully conducted empirical studies will provide insights for practitioners and stimulate further research. This paper describes an analysis of the stress patterns used by advanced Brazilian learners in the production of English compound nouns. It was predicted that the lack of distinction between composite nominals and compound nouns in Portuguese would strongly influence the participants to assign primary stress to the final constituent, regardless of the syntax. Data were collected by means of a reading activity which included the target constructions in unrelated sentences. Results confirmed a strong tendency for participants to give greater prominence to the second constituent of compounds, although exceptions to this tendency indicated that the participants' choice of stress pattern may also have been influenced by the length of constituents and relative familiarity of the lexical items involved Edited By Barbara O. Baptista, Michael Alan Watkins. Includes Bibliographical References And Indexes.