出版社：Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto
摘要：We show that the generative phonological distinction between lexical and surface representation can explain apparenly contradictory orders of acquisition of voice and aspiration contrasts by native speakers of English. Cross-language speech perception research has shown that English speakers distinguish synthetic voice onset time counterparts of aspirated-unaspirated minimal pairs more easily, and earlier, than voiced-voiceless. Here we present evidence that in the perceptual acquisition of the same Thai contrasts, english speakers acquire voicing before aspiration. These divergent results are claimed to be due to the level of representation tapped by the methodologies employed in each case. In the earlier research, phoneme identification and discrimination tasks were used, which can be completed without accessing lexical representations. Here we employed a word identification task which forces lexical access, in that subjects must decide which member of a minimal pair of words they have heard. The differences in performance on the two types of tasks correlate with the presence of aspiration in surface, but not lexical, representations in English. This provides evidence that in the initial stages of L2 acquisition, learners construct lexical representations that make use of only one feature that are present lexically in the L1.
关键词：Second Language Acquisition;Thai;Voice;Aspiration
