Confusion Effect

In the earlier studies of second language phonology acquisition, it was generally believed that cross-linguistic phonological differences between the first and second languages were responsible for the L2 learners'difficulties of producing some sounds in the target language, holding that linguistic differences signified learning difficulties. Later with increasing criticisms against Contrastive Analysis for its predictive power for learners'phonological errors, some researchers shifted their attention from cross-linguistic differences to cross-linguistic similarities and adopted the opposite point of view, advocating that cross-linguistic phonological similarities might cause greater difficulties for learners'acquisition of the target language phonology. Subsequently, a great amount of empirical studies appeared to support the belief.However, it seems that previous studies were too general in describing the influence of cross-linguistic phonological similarities upon the L2 learners'phonological acquisition. It is still uncertain how the different types of cross-linguistic similarities affect L2 learners'phonology learning separately and jointly, especially in the Chinese context. Therefore, the present study explored the effects of cross-linguistic phonological similarities between English and Chinese upon the Chinese-speaking college English learners'phonological acquisition.The author first proposed a notion of confusion effect to refer to the phonological difficulties caused by the cross-linguistic phonological similarities between English and Chinese. Then from the external (objective phonological similarities of English and Chinese) and internal (learners'perceived similarity of English and Chinese) perspectives, the present study examined the separate and interactive effects of two factors on Chinese-speaking college learners'acquisition of the English phonology.In October 2009,50 sophomores from the College of Literature, Southwest University, Chongqing, participated in this study,29 of whom were finally selected as valid subjects. Data elicitation was mainly based on two self-designed questionnaires, and a self-designed English pronunciation test.The results of the current study indicated that the two factors, i.e., objective phonological similarity between English and Chinese and learners'perceived phonological similarity between the two, affect the learners'acquisition of English phonology, both separately and interactively.Learners made more errors with objectively similar sound pairs than with objectively dissimilar sound pairs. They made more errors with perceptually similar sound pairs than with perceptually dissimilar sound pairs. In addition, when learners'perception of phonological similarity between English and Chinese was very low, i.e., learner dissimilar, learners made many more errors with objectively similar sound pairs than with objectively dissimilar ones. When the sound pairs were objectively dissimilar, i.e., expert dissimilar, learners committed more errors with perceptually similar sounds than with perceptually dissimilar ones.The findings of this study suggest that teachers, in practice, should alter their teaching methodology to positively influence students'judgment of language distance, and that students should pay more attention to the distinction between English phonology and Chinese phonology to avoid the confusion effect.