Disfluency in the Process of Acquisition of the Second Language: Focusing on Dominant Phonological Units(<Feature Articles>Disordered Speech and Normal Utterance)

Abstract

This paper attempts to illuminate phonetic and phonological patterns underlying inter language speech. To do so, the first part of the paper reports the results of detailed statistic analysis of 690 samples of repetition style of disfluency produced by novice and advanced Japanese learners. The analysis has revealed two salient characteristics of inter language speech. 1) The novices substitute a syllable for the dominant phonological unit in the mother tongues. 2) In the process of getting the phonological unit of mora, it is possible that English and Chinese behave as negative transfers, and Korean is a positive transfer. In the second half of the paper, these results are interpreted with a psycho-linguistic model of language production. In the model, at the stage of the beginners, a lot of nodes of syllables belong to the last layer for output. The nodes of Japanese mora are formed at the advanced stage, leaving phonological systems of the mother tongues.