ACQUISTION OF ALVEO-PALATAL FRICATIVE [ʒ] BY PAKISTANI LEARNERS OF ENGLISH
Nasir A. Syed 

ABSTRACT
The speech learning model of second language acquisition predicts that if learners of an L2 cannot perceive a phonetic difference between two sounds they show equivalence classification for those sounds (Flege 1995). In case of equivalence classification between two sounds, the establishment of a separate phonetic category for the sounds is blocked as a result of which learners develop a single representation for both sounds. To test these predictions a listening and speaking experiment was conducted with two groups of Pakistani learners of English. The aim of the experiment was to find out how adult Pakistani learners perceive and produce English alveo-palatal fricative [ʒ]. Thirty participants from Pakistan and 31 Pakistanis living in the UK participated in the experiment.  All participants speak the same L1 (Saraiki) and were initially educated in the same type of educational institutions in Pakistan. After getting education from Pakistan, the UK-participants moved to England and were living in Essex at the time of data collection. The perception test consisted of a 3 alternative forced choice (3 AFC) test which is a discrimination task and also an identification task. In the production test, the learners produced English word ‘measure’ in isolation and in a carrier sentence. The productions of the participants were evaluated by four English native speaker judges. The results show that both groups perceive English [ʒ] as [j]. They also cannot produce English [ʒ] accurately. The results confirm the predictions of the speech learning model that L2 learners cannot produce an L2 sound accurately if they do not perceive it accurately. The findings are in line with previous studies on the speech learning model (see e.g. Flege 1987a, 1987b, 1993, 2003).
KEY WORDS: L2 acquisition, Pakistani English, perception, consonant, SLM