L2 Acquisition; Interdental fricative; Connectionist Optimality Theory

Abstract

In this paper English interdental fricative acquisition by Brazilians second language learners has been investigated. Data from oral productions of three students groups has been gathered. The first group is composed by sixth semester undergraduate students of an English course, the second and third groups are composed by third and tenth semester students. First, a phonetic transcription of selected words that contained interdental fricatives has been performed. Then, an analysis based on Connectionist Optimality Theory has been carried out. This analysis uses the reranking of constraints, and it reveals that Brazilians second language learners are prone to make substitutions of the segment /θ/ by the segment [t] as well as the substitutions of the segment /ð/ by the segment [d]. Furthermore, there is a strong impact of the Lexical Frequency on the learners productions.