On the Explanation of Phonic Interference¹

The question as to what information is of fundamental importance in the construction of phonological tasks in a course in a foreign language is raised and an attempt is made to indicate an answer with respect to a particular problem encountered by native speakers of Japanese and Russian in learning English. Conventional phonemics and contrastive analysis are found deficient as bases for the explanation of this problem and generative phonology is shown to provide a more promising basis. Finally, suggestions are made for incorporating information from a generative phonology into a set of tasks which would have the goal of eliminating the observed interference behavior.