Date:  Sat, 12 Mar 1994 12:23:37 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike <RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET>

Subject: Re: Conscious Learning of Accent



Re Don Lance's I/E + Nasal system-switching from English to Spanish, I did not

have the advantage of learning Spanish the "natural" way, and though we had

native-speaker teachers, I don't recall any attention to pronunciation. When

I lived in Mexico I consciously worked on introducing the distinction in my

Spanish (without leaking through to my English), but there remain earlier-

learned lexical items (such as <enchilada>) which I unconsciously still

pronounce with [I]. I still don't really HEAR the difference in Spanish if

I am focusing on the content rather than form (it is hard to do both), and

as in English, I use spelling as the cue. (I don't know what the theoretical

import is of adding a Spell-Check to Chomsky's Phonetic Form [PF] component.)

Come to think of it, one reason for the problem with <enchilada> is that it

is also part of my English lexicon. What brought it to mind was hearing an

English speaker on campus the other day saying /iynchIlada/, with exaggerated

stress on the first syllable.

--Rudy Troike (rtroike[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ccit.arizona.edu)