Potential Allophonic Transfers in Indonesians' EFL Acquisition: Unaspiration and Final Devoicing

Abstract

Unalike allophonic features between L1 and L2 often cause language learners to utter sounds differently from native speakers. This is due to language learners' inclination to transfer their L1's features to their L2 production. The objective of this paper is to contrast certain allophonic behaviors, namely consonant unaspiration and final obstruent devoicing, of stop phonemes (/p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, /g/) in English and Indonesian with the aim of identifying the potential negative transfer performed by Indonesian EFL learners. The findings predict that: (1) learners might tend to substitute the English allophones [p^h], [t^h], and [k^h], with the Indonesian [p]/[p Ìš ], [t]/[t Ìš ], and [k]/[k Ìš ] respectively due to the transfer of consonant unaspiration rules; and (2) they might also tend to replace the final voiced-obstruents [b], [d], and [g] in English with the final devoiced [p Ìš ], [t Ìš ], and [k Ìš ] in Indonesian by reason of transferring final devoicing features. With regard to the phonemic contrasts and intelligibility of those allophones in the English, only the transfer of final devoicing can be seen as negative transfer.