Is There a Structural Foreign Accent? A Comparison of Syntactic and Phonological Errors in Second Language Acquisition

The purpose of this study is to assess the validity of the claim that native language transfer manifests itself primarily at the level of phonology. Experimentation was designed to test whether native speakers can identify distinct foreign accents in speakers of English as a second language from different language backgrounds with and without the aid of phonological cues. Written and oral data were evaluated by native speaking judges to ascertain the extent to which they could identify members of the same native language group on the basis of either phonological or syntactic evidence. The results indicate that though native speakers of English are able to identify learners from the same mother tongue backgrounds when phonological cues are present, they cannot do so using only syntactic evidence. While these data do not confirm conclusively the hypothesis suggested above, they do lend strong support to it. An examination is then made of other research data to see if they confirm the hypothesis that syntactic and phonological L2 acquisition are different with respect to the degree to which they are influenced by LI interference.