Abstract

CID GUZMAN, Luis Alejandro. Negative transfer from Spanish to English in vowels /ʌ/ and /æ/. Íkala [online]. 2017, vol.22, n.2, pp.287-309. ISSN 0123-3432.  https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.ikala.v22n02a08.

The aim of this non-experimental descriptive study is to establish if linguistic negative transfer caused by aural perception of Spanish vowel phonemes is responsible for spelling mistakes found in 5th graders' written texts from a Spanish-English bilingual school in Concepción, Chile. The subjects of this study participated in an aural perception test in which they had to represent English vowels /ʌ/ and /æ/ -these vowels were presented in twelve pseudo words. The results are consistent with the literature on the subject of phonetic-phonological negative transfer, suggesting the influence of Spanish phonics on the auditory vowel perception in English, both for pseudo words within a semantic context and in isolation.

Keywords : English teaching; foreign language acquisition; spelling; linguistic transfer; phonetic-phonological negative transfer..

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