On the Naturalness of Interlanguage Phonological Rules1

Two interesting questions which are raised by the interlanguage (IL) hypothesis are (1) to what extent are ILs independent of the native language (NL) and the target language (TL), and (2) d o the grammars of 1Ls contain the same type of rules a s the grammars of other languages. To address these questions, data were gathered from two native speakers of Spanish and two native speakers of Mandarin, all of whom were learning English as a second language. A partial phonological analysis of the 1L data revealed that (1) at least some of the 1L rules were independent in that they were motivated for neither the NL nor the TL, and (2) one of the IL rules, Terminal Devoicing, is motivated for the grammars of numerous languages whereas another rule, Schwa Paragoge, is apparently not part of the grammar of any other language. This conclusion raises the question of the extent to which ILs can be considered to be “natural languages.”