Article published In:
Australian Review of Applied LinguisticsVol. 11:1 (1988) ► pp.83–104
Factors influencing the initial stages of foreign language phoneme acquisition
The paper presents an analysis of the initial stages of foreign language phoneme acquisition and a report from two years of empirical research designed to verify the validity of some of its findings. The most interesting results seem to have been obtained so far in the study of those linguistic and non-linguistic factors which are related to the learner’s age: they indicate that interference from native phonemes the learners have stored in their memory may not necessarily be the only, or the most important, factor responsible for older learners’ problems with learning foreign phonemes during the initial stages.
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