Ss: 384 Austrian school children in grades 3-11 (two classes in four regions at each age

Results: a difference between sounds that the learners gradually improved on and sounds for which they showed no progress. /‘u/ in ‘boat’ only 55 per cent correctly by beginners but improved over time till 100% after eight years; /‘/ in ‘finger’, however, no improvement after eight year. The learners learnt 'fortis' /p/ versus ‘lenis’ /b/. only gradually, Austrian German having no such distinction.
Stages in acquisition of phonemes

1. Presystemic. At this stage learners learn the sounds in individual words but without any overall pattern.
2. Transfer. Now the learners start to treat the second language sounds systematically as equivalent to the sounds of their first language.
3. Approximative. Finally the learners realise their native sounds are not adequate and attempt to restructure the L2 sounds in a new system.

Aim: to test the claims of the ontogeny model that 'transfer processes decrease over time, while developmental processes increase and then decrease', plus differences of 'style'

Ss: 4 NSs of Brazilian Portuguese learning English for 40 hours a week

Method: hearing them reading word list, plus recorded conversation, 3 samples 4 weeks apart

Materials: many English consonant clusters do not exist in Portuguese, e.g. initial CC /sl sr sp st sk pr br tr dr kr gr/ and many final clusters.

Scoring :
T (transfer), [i] insertion as in[i]spy for spy; voicing [z]lap for slap
D (developmental substitution), [wr] for r; schwa (‘ ) insertion
C correct (=native-like)

'the number of correct or target-like utterances increases over time, transfer decreases and there seems very little change for developmental substitutions'

how important is transfer from L1 to L2?
do people develop phonology as they do grammar?
how does L2 affect L1?
teaching?

Reading:
Ioup, G. & Weinberger, S.H. (eds.) (1987), Interlanguage Phonology, Newbury House;
James, A. (1996), ‘Second language phonology’, in Jordens, P. & Lalleman, J., (eds) Investigating Second Language Acquisition, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 167-186

Tongue Twisters
Selection taken from V. Cook, Inside Language, Arnold, 1997
Unique New York! Toy boat. Peggy Babcock.
Mrs Pipple Popple popped a pebble in poor Polly Pepper's eye.
Charlie chooses cheese and cherries.
Old oily Ollie oils oily automobiles.
He ran from the Indes to the Andes in his undies.
Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
Shave a cedar shingle thin.
This thistle seems like that thistle.
Miss Ruth’s red roof thatch.
Any noise annoys an oyster but a noisy noise annoys an oyster most.
Tongue-twisters in different languages:
Tres tristes tigres trillaron trigo en un trigal. (Spanish: Three sad tigers threshed wheat in a wheat field)
Nama-mugi, nama-gome, nama-tamago. (Japanese: raw wheat, raw rice, raw eggs)
Le ver vert va vers le verre vert. (French: the green grub goes to the green glass)
Nie pieprz wieprza pieprzem. (Polish: do not pepper the hog with pepper)
Un limon, mezzo limon (Italian: one lemon, half a lemon)
Surrealistic aphorisms by Marcel Duchamps
Abominable fourrures abdominales. (abominable abdominal furs)
My niece is cold because my knees are cold.
Etrangler l’étranger. (strangle the stranger)
Examples invented for a competition by nine-year-old children in Ardleigh, a village in Essex:
Super-sonic sausages.
The stranger strangles Susey with some long stretchy string.
Tongue twisters give me blisters.
Bob and Bill brought bits.
My monkey mistakes my mum’s messy mixture for a monkey.
Trees with green leaves.
Main sources for tongue-twisters:
Schwartz, A. (1972), A Twister of Twists, a Tangler of Tongues, Lipincott, Philadelphia;
Sanquillet, M. & Peterson, E. (eds.) (1978), The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamps, Thames & Hudson