/də/ /'mʊsɪk/ /ɪn'dʊstrɪ/ /jas/ /es'tarted/ /teɪkɪn/ /le'gal/ /ak'ʃɒn/. A preliminary study on the nature and impact of phonological and orthographic transfer in the language of bilingual speakers of Spanish and Galician when communicating in English

Abstract

[eng] The present paper aims to describe instances of phonological and orthographic interference in the English speech of bilingual speakers of Galician and Spanish. Data were collected from both high school and university level subjects, and three spoken tasks were used: (a) a picture-story; (b) a text reading; and, (c) oral presentations. General British was taken as a model in classifyingmistakes. Findings reveal that a high number of the pronunciation mistakes made by bilingual speakers of Spanish and Galician when speaking in English can be attributed to phonological or orthographic interference from their native languages. More particularly, at the phonological level, these subjects had identifiable problemswith /N/,word stress, and certain initial and word-final consonant clusters. Furthermore, many mistakes due to orthographic transfer were registered across all groups of participants and tasks, most of which could be categorised into two groups: (a) transfer involving the pronunciation of a Spanish vowel guided by the spelling of a word; and (b) interference in which speakers did not pronounce unstressed syllables with a schwa in spellings like <ar, er, or> but rather with a full Spanish vowel followed by a /R/ sound. Some pedagogical implications of learner findings will be discussed in the last section.