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Difference or Disorder?
THE SOUND SYSTEMS OF LANGUAGES
When considering the sound systems of two languages, it is necessary to determine
which sounds exist in both languages and which sounds are unique to one language or the
other. This information helps in the evaluation of speech production errors and aids in
determining whether errors could be due to differences in the sound systems of the two
languages (Kester & Peña, 2008). Phonotactic constraints, which refer to allowable sound
combinations in a particular language (Dell, Reed, Adams, & Meyer, 2000), also are
considered. For example, the sounds /np/ cannot occur together at the beginning of a word
in English. When considering the information about which phonemes are available in each
language and in what patterns or word positions they can occur, it is possible to determine
whether errors are expected or not. For example, the unvoiced “th” sound of English does
not exist in most dialects of Spanish. Thus, when a Spanish speaker learning English
encounters this sound, he or she will most often produce the closest sound that does exist in
his or her sound repertoire. For Spanish‐speaking bilinguals, in this case, that would be [t].
Linguists have different opinions regarding the phonemic makeup of different
languages. For this reason, there are variations in the literature on the consonant and vowel
phonemes in each of the languages we have included in Difference or Disorder?. Within this
text, we have attempted to include all possible phonemes, but have noted when allophonic
variations exist. In addition, there are variations in the vowel phonemes included in English,
due to dialectal variations. We utilize a set of 12 vowels for the contrastive analyses in this
text. The use of Venn diagrams allows for an easy visual representation of sounds that might
be problematic for an English language learner across a number of native languages.
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