Impact of L1 Transfer on L2 Pronunciation of Iranian High School Third Graders: The Case of Consonant Cluster

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate some difficulties that Persian high school students may have in producing some English consonant clusters orally. Since consonant clusters in a language comply with its underlying phonological rules, or more specifically underlying syllabic structure, it seems to be quite relevant to deal with the syllabic structural rules of first and second languages. It could be hypothesized that third grade high school, girls and boys, which were chosen randomly when facing such structural unfamiliarity’s resort to their native language phonological rules. By taking contrastive analysis hypothesis (CAH) into account, we could get a clearer vision partly towards the difficulties to reject or confirm the hypothesis.