JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Association of Teachers of Spanish andPortuguese is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Hispania. Abstract: This study investigates the role that native language transfer and task formality play in the second language acquisition of the Spanish voiced stop phonemes /b d g/ and their spirantized variants, [e o ]fin order to identify specific problems that beset learners. The results of a data-based experiment involving two groups of native English speakers studying Spanish reveal that native language transfer plays a prominent role in hampering the acquisition of the voiced spirants [e o f]. Students largely fail to spirantize the voiced stops in L2 speech and incorrectly transfer the phonemic status of English /o/ to Spanish, leading to a slower rate of acquisition of this phone. The presence of orthographic v also interferes with the acquisition of Spanish [b] and [ ] and leads to a decrease in accurate pronunciation during formal reading tasks.

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This study examines the role that voiced stop spirantization plays in the acquisition of English /b d g/ and / 5 / by native Spanish speakers. The results of a data-based experiment show that accuracy in English pronunciation is hindered by native language transfer, including the transfer of spirantization and LI syllable structure constraints. Furthermore, the suppression of spirantization is not achieved at an equal rate for all voiced stops: /&/ is spirantized the least often. It is proposed that the phonemic value of Ihl in English contributes to thisdisparity. An examination of the L2 pronunciation of /&/ further reveals that learners do not assign phonemic status to / £ / in all contexts; it is acquired in postvocalic position first and only more gradually acquired elsewhere.

This study examines the accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility of speakers of English from China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United States (US) by listeners from Hong Kong, Singapore, China, and the US on two speech tasks (read vs. conversation). It also examines the effect of shared background on scores for all listeners as well as the effect of international experience for the Hong Kong and the US listeners. The study found that although accentedness and comprehensibility were positively correlated, neither variable was significantly correlated with intelligibility. The study found that shared background increased ratings of accentedness and comprehensibility but not intelligibility scores, and that international experience also had an effect during the conversational task, in that listeners with international experience received significantly higher intelligibility scores than those without any such international experience.

In Spanish, focused elements may appear at the beginning of a sentence. Following Chomsky (1971) and Sufler (1982), we will assume that the focus of an utterance is the phrase that contains the informational center which receives the main sentential stress. In this article, we will be concerned with two kinds of foci: an "informational" focus and a "contrastive" focus. 1 Following Halliday (1967), we will assume that the informational focus is the element which receives prominence within the message. As Halliday (1967:204) notes, this informational focus "reflects the Speaker* s decision äs to where the main bür-den of the message lies". For Sufler (1982:11), the informational focus "represents the most important or 'loaded' element in the sentence, and it tends to fall within the rheme under conditions of neutral stress and Intonation". 2 In these constructions, which we shall call informational focus constructions, and äs noted by Hernanz and Brucart (1987), the focused element appears in the front of the sentence, there is no pause between the focused element and the rest of the sentence, and subject/verb inversion is obligatory. In contrastive focus constructions, on the other hand, the focused element is being emphasized äs opposed to another element in the sentence. The focus bears emphatic Intonation, there is a pause between the focused element and the rest of the sentence, and subject/verb inversion is preferred, although not obligatory. Hernanz and Brucart further argue that informational focus (IF) inThis paper is an elaboralion of a paper under the same title presented at the Symposium on Spanish Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago in November, 1988. We would like to thank the participants and especially Margarita Süßer, Heles Contreras, Violeta Demonte, Malta Lujan, and Paula Kempchinsky for their comments and support We are also grateful to our two anonymous Probus reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments.See Rochemont (1986) for a discussion of focus in generative grammar, Campos (1986) for a discussion of focus applied to Spanish, and Campos (1989) for a discussion of the interrelation between focus and clitic placement in modern Galegan. See also Hernanz and Brucart (1987). See Surler (l 982) for further discussion of focus äs related to the Prague School notions of "theme" and "rheme' 1 .