This thesis looked at the concept of sonority and its influence in the acquisition of complex coda consonant clusters by ESL Spanish speakers. An experiment was performed to test the relationship between the sonority values of the segments of final complex clusters and the rate of errors. The goal of this thesis was to test the hypothesis that the Sonority Sequencing Principle was a powerful linguistic constraint that affected the acquisition of L2 phonology. The findings confirmed the idea that sonority played a crucial role in the phonological acquisition of L2 learners. Subjects reduced the least sonorant segment of the final cluster in order to achieve the minimal sonority descent. The choice of the segment could not be attributed to possible L1 interference since Spanish did not license complex codas and any final obstruents except /s/. The minimal sonority distance factor effected the rate of errors. Subjects produced more errors in clusters where the sonority distance between their segments was small (e.g., one, two, and three).

The research begins with an examination of the problems attending the growth in the use of English as a lingua franca between non-native speakers. It is argued that vanable first-language specific phonological 'errors' generate much of the miscommunication that is a characteristic of such interlanguage talk (ILT), original support for this claim being provided by a pilot study involving non-native speaker postgraduate students. Following a brief reappraisal of the place of language transfer in second language acquisition, its role in interlanguage (IL) phonology is examined in detail. Phonological transfer is revealed as a central and complex feature of the developing IL The theoretical position is exemplified by a selection of phonological transfer errors drawn from ILT classroom observation, such errors being redefmed in seriousness according to a taxonomy of new criteria based essentially on their effects on ILT communication. The extensive variation to which these taxonomic errorS are subject is discussed in the light of current theories of IL variation, and Accommodation Theory is concluded to have the greatest potential to account for phonological transfer or variation in ILT. The motivations underlying the accommodative processes of convergence and divergence are discussed and the framework is then extended to a motivation considered more salient in ILT: that of interlocutor comprehensibility. Two empirical studies investigate phonological variation in ILT from an accommodation perspective, the findings leading to the conclusion that while accommodation has an essential role in determining phonological error in ILT, its linguistic manifestation is usually one of suppression and non-suppression rather than of traditional convergence and divergence. Pedagogical implications of the research include the benefits of pair and smallgroup work, thus supporting previous research, and the need for classroom exposure to IL varieties of English.

Ph.D. (Educational Psychology) / This study works with a metaphor analysis of the creative work of English First Additional Language learners that may be overlooked at a first-level reading. The research is located in a postcolonial South Africa where English is a powerful enabling medium that can exclude learners from appropriate language competence at their school grade level. Instead of taking a probing and fresh look at the African context, the local curriculum still imposes English as the first language onto EFAL. The influence of language and culture upon each other lies at the heart of metaphor production and education. The research probes the significance of the way in which EFAL learners express meaning through metaphor. Metaphor is no longer viewed as a poetic device only, but is now reconceptualised as a profound part of our everyday thinking. The method used in this study rests on a deeper level of understanding the metaphor expressed in learners’ essays. According to a newly developed method, metaphors are identified, interpreted, contextualised, themes are distinguished and lastly these themes are related to similar metaphoric themes in the field. It is found that learners make use of themes that are reported from other languages in other parts of the world. These metaphors are distinguished as master or universal metaphors and seem to be embedded in human thinking. The five dimensions of the research approach make it possible to relate, in a cyclical way, from the most basic element, identification, to the most comprehensive element, master themes, of the method. Both the specificity and complexity of metaphor use and production are studied in a conceptualisation of metaphor that enables language analysis at a deeper level. Another contribution of this study is to look at metaphor beyond traditional linguistic matters, so that an original and powerful use of language is discovered. Although this contradicts years of training, errors made by learners become unimportant when viewed against the plethora of metaphors in their writing. Concepts that we believe in determine what we perceive, how we live in the world and how we relate to others. The conceptual system that we believe in plays a major role in defining our daily realities. Our system of concepts is metaphorical, with metaphors structuring how we perceive, think and act. This study creates a new methodology to explore the meaning behind metaphor production of learners who are estranged in the English class, and so contributes to understanding the way in which learners express their lifeworlds. There seems to be limited studies on the use of metaphor in creative writing by L2 speakers of any language. It is concluded that learners’ familiarity with and proficiency in English as the LoLT could be enhanced when they are encouraged to use English in a way that reflects their identities and cultural understandings through metaphor.

This thesis examines the possibility that connectivity in learner lexicons can be measured using receptive word-association tasks.

The purpose of this thesis is to propose a theory of language acquisition which could serve as a basis for further studies in this area. The thesis is divided into two sections, the first dealing with the psycholinguistic aspects of language and its acquisition, and the second dealing with the activities of the brain which relate to language ability, behavior, and acquisition.

The purpose of this longitudinal, ideographic clinical research project was to analyze a corpus of expressive language emitted by a child at the two word stage of language development via grammatico-semantic relationships (Brown, 1973) and via Developmental Sentence Analysis (Lee, 1974).

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This dissertation explores the potential differences in the acquisition of the sound system of a second language (L2) versus a third language (L3), building on recent research on adult L2 speech learning and testing the hypothesis that new category acquisition is available across the lifespan. On the one hand, recent influential theories of L2 speech learning predict that new sound categories will be difficult to acquire due to complex interactions among the phonetic categories residing in one same perceptual space. On the other, there exists the common assumption that the more sound categories one’s native language contains, the less difficult it will be to acquire new ones in a native-like fashion. My work provides additional evidence to this discussion, while providing speech data from the following five different speaker groups: (1) native speakers of American English; (2) native speakers of Mexican Spanish; (3) native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese; (4) native speakers of English learning Portuguese as their L2, and (5) native speakers of English learning Portuguese as their L3, who speak Spanish as their L2.The dissertation consists of three content chapters. The first of the content chapters describes the vowel systems of Mexican Spanish, American English and Brazilian Portuguese as informed by production data of the three native speaker groups above (1, 2 and 3). The second and third chapters describe and contrast the vowel system(s) of the two learner groups (4 and 5) as informed by their production and perception of Portuguese vowels respectively. The results from the analysis of the data from the various production and perception experiments performed as part of this dissertation provide evidence for (a) phonetic category assimilation and dissimilation processes in post-L1 speech learning and phonetic category interactions in general; (b) the relevance of quality and quantity of input in language learning; (c) the discussion on the relation between perception and production in post-L1 speech learning; and (d) the need for an extension of current models of L2 speech learning and cross-linguistic speech perception in order for these to address post-L2 speech learning processes, among other topics.

Interest in Portuguese has steadily increased over the last decade in universities across both North and South America (Carvalho 2002, 2011), principally among Spanish speakers. Generally speaking, Portuguese for Spanish-speakers courses have been designed around the theory that Spanish-speaking students will benefit from cross-linguistic influence (CLI, or transfer) due to the typological similarity that exists between Portuguese and Spanish (see Júdice, 2000). Related to this, the Typological Primacy Model, or TPM (Rothman, 2011), states that CLI in L3 acquisition principally comes from the language that is perceived to be typologically similar to the target language (psycho-typology, see Kellerman, 1983), resulting in both positive and negative transfer. Although there is a high degree of typological similarity between Spanish and Portuguese, it is unknown whether or not this linguistic proximity is equally salient to all learners and whether or not learners view this linguistic proximity as an advantage or a disadvantage when learning Portuguese. Furthermore, some studies have suggested that the context in which one's Spanish is acquired may play a role in the different types of CLI evident among different Spanish-speaking learners of Portuguese (e.g., Carvalho & da Silva, 2006; Johnson, 2004; Koike & Gualda, 2008). Consequently, Carvalho (2002, 2011) has called for more empirical evidence to shed light on the nature of CLI between Spanish and Portuguese. This dissertation, consisting of three main studies, seeks to answer this call by examining the effects of language background on L3 Portuguese acquisition among three groups of Spanish-speaking bilinguals: L1 Spanish (L1S) bilinguals, L2 Spanish (L2S) bilinguals, and heritage speakers of Spanish (HS bilinguals). Results from both quantitative and qualitative analyses of questionnaire data from the first study suggest that although all participants view Spanish as the principal source of CLI in L3 Portuguese acquisition, L2S bilinguals and HS bilinguals perceive the role of Spanish as significantly more facilitative when learning Portuguese than do L1S bilinguals. The second and third studies used a sentence completion task and a preference/grammaticality judgment task (see Ayoun, 2000) to measure bilingual students' knowledge of mood distinctions in Spanish in obligatory and non-obligatory contexts, respectively, and how they transfer that knowledge to Portuguese. Results indicate that the L2S group scored significantly lower on both measures of mood distinctions in obligatory contexts in Spanish, but transferred over more of their knowledge to Portuguese than either the L1S or HS groups. Similarly, results suggest that L2S bilinguals do not understand the variable nature of mood distinctions in non-obligatory environments, but show almost identical strategies of mood selection in both Spanish and Portuguese. In contrast, L1S and HS bilinguals display knowledge of the variable nature of mood distinctions in Spanish in these contexts but show marked differences in mood selection between the Spanish and Portuguese tasks. The results of these studies contribute to L3 acquisition literature by emphasizing the complexity involved in determining the role of the background languages in CLI and by highlighting the importance of the context of acquisition in CLI. In addition, the results provide more empirical evidence regarding the differences between how different groups of Spanish-speaking bilinguals transfer their knowledge when acquiring L3 Portuguese.