Review of Contrastive Analysis

The languages we compared in class are NASE (North American Standard English) and Spanish.

1.  Does Spanish have more or fewer vowels than English?

It has fewer (5).

2.  Comment on the significance of the following word pairs, identifying the vowels that speakers will target for each word.  (Also be able to transcribe these words).

a.  grid -- greed

b.  full -- fool

c.  buddy -- body

d.  mess -- mass

3.  What are the phonemes that can occur in syllable-final position in English?  What are the rules about syllable-final consonants in Spanish? 

English allows all consonants other than /h/ to occur in word-final syllables.  In Spanish, /s/, /n/, /r/, and sometimes /d/ are allowed.

4.  What allophones of /l/ exist in English and how do these compare to /l/ in Spanish?