ANALYSIS OF PHONETIC/PHONOLOGICAL ERRORS AND DIFFICULTIES WHICH OFTEN OCCUR DURING FOREIGN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Abstract

In the process of foreign language acquisition the mother tongue is constantly present. The use of a phonetic system of a foreign language may be disrupted by the articulation base of the mother tongue. To what extent the articulation base may disrupt the learning process of a foreign language, depends on how much the native and the foreign language correspond phonetically. In other words, this learning process depends on similarities and dissimilarities between these two languages. It is very difficult to accomplish the pronunciation of particular sounds of a foreign language which are either minimally dissimilar compared to a phoneme of the mother tongue, or sounds which differ extremely in their way of articulation (for instance, some Arabic pharyngeal and glottal sounds, etc.). Prosodic elements are differently expressed from language to language: sometimes stronger (for example, French and Hungarian), sometimes weaker. If prosodic elements are extremely marked in the native language, they will interfere with the learning process and will be harder to remove from the foreign language.