There is little doubt that native language phonetics and phonology are powerful influences on second language pronunciation, and this chapter will consider some of the more important aspects of those influences. As with other aspects of second language performance, pronunciation often shows other influences besides cross-linguistic ones; accordingly, developmental and other factors will be examined, as well as transfer involving writing systems.

General versus specific predictions

The literature on second language acquisition and language teaching is replete with descriptions of the difficulties that learners encounter in trying to pronounce sounds in a foreign language, and contrastive explanations for such difficulties are quite common (Dechert, Briiggemeir, and Futterer 1984). As the discussion in the next section shows, there is considerable – but not total – support for specific contrastive predictions. Aside from specific predictions, general predictions are also possible. For example, one might predict that a speaker of Thai will have more difficulty in learning to pronounce English than a speaker of Persian will. In fact, some research on ESL pronunciation (Suter 1976; Purcell and Suter 1980) supports that prediction; in carefully controlled analyses of judgments of pronunciation accuracy, the pronunciation of speakers of Thai and Japanese did not receive as high ratings as did the pronunciation of speakers of Arabic and Persian. Suter (1976) acknowledges that such results do not in themselves explain what features of native language pronunciation contribute most to a high or low evaluation of pronunciation accuracy.