The Influence of Turkish Sound System on English Pronunciation

Studies conducted in the phonology field have confirmed that no matter how proficient we are in a language, we still transfer some features of our native language to our performance in other languages we speak.

This transfer is more visible when speaking. On the other hand, others suggested that if we live in a country where L2 is spoken and become exposed to language intensively for a substantial amount of time, our accent may get closer to that of a native speaker.

In order to test these hypotheses, this study explored the English pronunciation performances of Turkish speakers while producing Indo-European loan words in Turkish.

Participants of this study are Turkish graduate students who lived in the U.S. for at least 5 years. This qualitative study while confirming some of the findings obtained in previous studies also revealed unexpected results that could be explained by individual differences.