User:Wedge95/sandbox

Either replace or explain some of the vague ideas mentioned in the article to make it more understandable to non-linguists.

Distinguishing between different phonemes in an L2 can be a significantly difficult task. For example, Dutch L2 English speakers were less capable of distinguishing between English  /æ/ and /ɛ/ than Dutch-English bilinguals (Díaz).

Different sounds, called allophones, can be recognized as being under the umbrella of a single phoneme, for example, English speakers produce aspirated and unaspirated /t/ but are perceived as the same sound. This distinction can be much more important in other languages. Perceptions of what allophones can be grouped under what phonemes can vary even within languages. For example, in Quebec French alveolar stops can become affricates before certain vowels, but in Belgian French these affricates are not recognized as being phonemes of any alveolar stop (Beland).

The term 'distinctive speech elements' could be better explained to novices in linguistics or curious parties. The term 'allophone' appears but also requires a better explanation for the confused than the one we find here. The sentence introducing the idea of a contrastive feature desperately needs better wording and a comma removed. The example of long vs. short vowels as a phonemic contrast is a much better explanation than the actual intended explanation. The long vs. short vowel example is a good beginning, although that along with others could have been included in a larger separate section illustrating examples of phonemic contrast. In that case the introductory passages could have focused more on making sense of all of these terms that have been introduced with this very difficult wording. The same problems crop up in the final lines that introduce neutralization. The term is brought up but explained only with an example, and although it is related to the topic neutralization isn't the most relevant idea on the page. Perhaps if the article started with a solid foundation in explaining what phonemic contrast was and was able to explain the differences between a phoneme and an allophone, and if it were able to explain contrastive features better, then it would feel more natural for these side topics to be included and discussed with this level of detail. Some of the ideas brought up, if they were to remain, would need their own sections. Another issue appears when diaphonemic contrast is mentioned but is not explained or developed and no examples for it are given. This idea does seem relevant to the idea of phonemic contrast and deserves more attention than it receives in the article. To make matters worse, the link for the citation for diaphonemic contrast does not go anywhere. When the article specifically discusses 'the phonemic contrast of a word' the wording is also worded in a way that makes it very difficult to understand and doesn't include enough information to make any sense of the subject. Potential Articles to Improve This Page: Dufour, Sophie, Noël Nguyen, Chotiga Pattamadilok, and Ulrich Hans Frauenfelder. "Does Orthographic Training on a Phonemic Contrast Absent in the Listener's Dialect Influence Word Recognition?" The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 140.3 (2016): 1871-877. Web. 16 Feb. 2017. Minagawa-Kawai, Yasuyo, Koichi Mori, Nozomi Naoi, and Shozo Kojima. "Neural Attunement Processes in Infants during the Acquisition of a Language-Specific Phonemic Contrast." Journal of Neuroscience 27.2 (2007): 315-21. Web. 16 Feb. 2017. Eckman, Fred R., Gregory K. Iverson, and Jae Yung Song. "The Role of Hypercorrection in the Acquisition of L2 Phonemic Contrasts." Second Language Research 29.3 (2013): 257-83. Web. 16 Feb. 2017.

Introduction:

Allophones and Phonemes:

Different sounds, called allophones, can be recognized as being under the umbrella of a single phoneme, for example, English speakers produce aspirated and unaspirated /t/ but are perceived as the same sound. This distinction can be much more important in other languages. Perceptions of what allophones can be grouped under what phonemes can vary even within languages. For example, in Quebec French alveolar stops can become affricates before certain vowels, but in Belgian French these affricates are not recognized as being phonemes of any alveolar stop (Beland).

Phonemic Contrast in L2 Speakers:

Phonemic contrast is something that is developed from the very earliest stages of acquiring or learning a language.

Native English speaking L2 learners often have difficulty learning to hear the difference between sounds that are to them one and the same but to speakers of other languages are different phonemes. Take for instance the presence of aspirated and un-aspirated alveolar stops that both appear frequently in English, oftentimes without the speaker knowing about the existence of two allophones instead of one. In other languages the difference between these two allophones is obvious and significant to the meaning of the word. There is also the example of Arabic, which has two sounds that an English speaker would hear and classify as a voiced glottal fricative, only one of which is actually a voiced glottal fricative. The other, written as ⟨ħ⟩, is a voiceless pharyngeal fricative.