submitted to department of english and communication 英语及傳播學系.pdfVIP

CITY UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG 香港城市大學 The Markedness Differential Hypothesis and the Acquisition of English Final Consonants by Cantonese ESL Learners in Hong Kong 標記區分假設與學習英語的香港 學生習得英語詞尾輔音的研究 Submitted to Department of English and Communication 英文及傳播學系 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy 哲學碩士學位 by Lo Sun Keung 羅新強 August 2007 二零零七年八月 ii ABSTRACT This study sets out to test the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) with regard to the acquisition of English word-final consonants by Cantonese learners of English as a second language (ESL) in Hong Kong. English consonant clusters and singleton consonants among which markedness relationships exist were chosen as the focus. Ten Cantonese learners of English at the intermediate and upper-intermediate levels participated in the study. They were asked to perform three different tasks: The reading of a word list, the description of pictures, and the reading of sentences in the form of grammaticality judgement. The participants’ speech performance was recorded by a high-quality mp3 recorder and transcribed by the researcher. The results largely contradict the predictions of the MDH. Of the three predictions of the MDH with reference to three implicational universals involving final consonant clusters and singleton consonants, two of them are