Practice Time

Exercise 1. Look back at Exercise 3 in Chapter 4.  Given what you concluded about the phonology of Japanese in that exercise, predict whether it would likely be easy or difficult for an L1 speaker of Japanese to learn the English contrast between words like sip/ship, sign/shine, class/clash. Explain how you arrived at your conclusion.

Exercise 2. Look again at Exercise 2 in Chapter 4.  In that exercise, you concluded that German has a phoneme [ʃ] that contrasts with another phoneme that has two allophones, [x] and [ç] (a voiceless velar fricative and voiceless palatal fricative, respectively). Given what you know about English phonology, how easy or difficult will it be for an L1 speaker of English to learn this contrast in German? Explain how you arrived at your conclusion.