LINGUIST 2PS3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Voiceless Velar Fricative, Voiced Velar Fricative, Phoneme

• School: McMaster University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LINGUIST 2PS3
• Professor: Catherine Anderson

Document Summary

Physically the sounds in those words are same in each pair and vots vary across the pairs. Gift = real word, kift = non-word. If acoustically ambiguous then context plays a big role. If long vot (doesn"t matter context) expectations don"t override what we hear. Listeners hearing l2 phonemes assimilate them to the phonological system of l1. If listening to l2 you"re listening through filter of exp of l1. Minimal pairs changes meaning of words so important to learn these contrasts in l2. Depending on l1 exp, some contrasts would be easy or hard to learn. Easy: two l2 phonemes map onto two l1 phonemes. Two l2 phonemes don"t exist in l1 generating a new category from scratch b/c no interference from l1. So can"t have l1 exp override learning l2 phonemes. Hard: two l2 phonemes map onto one l1 phoneme.