Interaction between Markedness and Transfer in English Coda Nasals: Taiwanese Learning English as a Foreign Language

This paper aims to explore how a transfer effect and an unmarkedness effect interact in Taiwanese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners¡¯ English production, using an Optimality Theoretic approach. My focus is the nasals in syllable coda positions. This study carried out an English production experiment, in which sixty-two participants took part. These participants were 29 Mandarin native speakers (the Mandarin group: MG) and 33 Southern Min native speakers (the Southern Min group: SG). Each participant read 51 test sentences with target coda nasals. There are three major findings in this study: (1) Southern Min speakers have less difficulty with English /m/ than Mandarin speakers do, suggesting a positive transfer of the first language (L1) phonemic system to the second language (L2); (2) there exists a strong tendency toward unmarked coronal [n] in codas found in both MG and SG and there is no phonological rule of [m] or [?] becoming [n] in these learners¡¯ L1, revealing that an unmarkedness effect plays a significant role in shaping the production of interlanguage English with respect to coda nasals; and (3) the preceding two findings reveal that transfer and unmarkedness interact to influence the learning of English coda nasals and that unmarkedness overrides transfer in shaping Taiwanese EFL learners¡¯ English interlanguage, leading to the strong preference for unmarked [n] in phonetic representations.