Effects of gender, L2 proficiency and style on L2 interlanguage phonology

This study investigated L2 interlanguage phonology, focusing on the merging of syllable-initial /n-/ with /l-/ in English by Hong Kong students. The mother tongue of Hong Kong students is Cantonese, and the initial /n-/ is replaced by /l-/ in their L1 spontaneous production (Yeung 1980, Bourgerie 1990 and Ho 1994, 2004). This study adopted Labov’s (1972) and Tarone’s (1983, 1988) research methodology. It included elementary, intermediate and post-intermediate English learners from primary school, secondary school and university respectively. Six English tasks were designed for collecting data: free conversation, informal interview, passage reading, word reading, minimal pair reading and minimal pair repetition. The study shows that negative phonological transfer from L1 to L2 occurs and there is a negative correlation between L1 phonological transfer and phonological awareness in L2. The results of Variable Rule Analysis indicate that stylistic variation plays the most important role in the phonological variation in L2 interlanguage. The effect of L2 proficiency on L2 interlanguage variation is weak but still stronger than that of gender. The findings of the study suggest that more attention should be paid to stylistic variation in L2 learning. More in-depth investigation on the relationships between L2 interlanguage variability and the variations of situational and psycholinguistic contexts are needed, which enables us to have a clear understanding of the nature of L2 interlanguage.