April McMahon

THE PHONEME 21sounds, and learn to produce both in the same context. In perceptualterms, it is again easier to hear a completely new sound, which willinitially be extremely easy to perceive because of its very unfamiliarity,than to learn to distinguish two sounds which have conceptually beenconsidered as one and the same. Conversely, a Korean speaker, who has[r] and [l] as allophones of a single phoneme, with [r] produced betweenvowels and [l] everywhere else, will make errors in learning English,finding minimal pairs like lot and rot highly counter-intuitive, and tendingto produce [l] at the beginning of both, but [r] medially in both lollyand lorry. A combination of unlearning and learning are needed to getthose patterns right.In Chapter 4, we shall return to phonemes and allophones, anddevelop more precise ways of stating exactly where each allophoneoccurs. First, however, we need some more phonetic detail on the consonantsof English, and some more technical vocabulary to describe howthey are produced.Exercises1. A learner of English as a second language has the following pronunciations(note that [ʃ] is the symbol for the first sound in ship, and [ð] forthe first sound in the):that [dat] dog [dɒg] head [hεd]leather [lεðə] leader [liðə]sing [ʃIŋ] sat [sat] loss [lɒs]fish [fIʃ] miss [mIʃ] push [pus]How might you explain these non-native pronunciations? How do youthink this learner would pronounce the bold-faced consonants in Daddy,either, loathe; ship, pass, dish, usher ?2. Do the following sounds contrast in English? Find minimal pairs tosupport your hypothesis, ideally for initial, medial and final position inthe word. Where minimal pairs for all positions do not seem to be available,write a short statement of where the sound in question can andcannot be found.[m n ŋ p b t d k g l r]3. The Ministry for Education in a certain country whose language hasup to now been unwritten has hired two foreign linguists to produce anorthography. Linguists A and B have suggested two rather differentsystems. Which one is most in line with the phonological structure of the