Resumen

GONZALEZ, Jorge Enrique  y  CASTILLO PINA, Luis Alberto. Velarization of postnuclear nasal consonants in the ESL of Venezuelan Spanish speakers. SAPIENS [online]. 2010, vol.11, n.2, pp.64-68. ISSN 1317-5815.

In this paper, the pronunciation of English postnuclear nasals, by Venezuelan “radical” Spanish speakers, is analysed from an acoustic-articulatory approach. The purpose of this study is to provide evidence for Venezuelan speakers’ articulatory habit of postnuclear nasal velarization transfer from Spanish to English. This study is framed within the field of L2 phonology and is based on the Natural Polisystemic Model (Chela-Flores, G. 1983, 1987, 2002), as well as in the notion of language transfer (Weinreich, 1968; Odlin, 1989; Ellis, 1997; among others). The sample consisted of thirteen university students of English at a basic level at UPEL-Maracay. The corpus was made up of ad-hoc oral instances, which comprised seven hundred and eighty postnuclear realizations. The results show a high percentage of errors (30.26%) in the pronunciation of English postnuclear nasals, 95.33% of which are due to nasal velarization. It was concluded that errors in the pronunciation of English postnuclear nasals by Venezuelan Spanish speakers are mainly caused by the transfer of nasal velarization from the native language (Venezuelan radical Spanish) to the target language.

Palabras clave : postnuclear nasals; L2 phonology; language transfer.

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