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| | /i/ and /I/ by Romanians speaking English |
 | | The second Romanian speaker, however, still shows a higher /i/ than /I/, but the lax vowel /I/ is more fronted in relation to the tense vowel /i/. |
 | | As Ladefoged says, “unlike Spanish and Italian, English differentiates between vowels such as those in “seat, sit” and “heed, hid,” in that /i/ is tense and /I/ is lax.” (Ladefoged 1993) The Romanian vowel system consists of seven vowels, with only one high front vowel /i/, described as being “front, close non-rounded” (Mallinson 1986). |
 | | This shows that phonological language transfer occurs from the source language into the target language, and that rather than producing a longer /I/, the interference results in affecting the position of the vowel production, namely a lower but fronted lax vowel /I/. |
| www.arches.uga.edu /~iuliab/abstract.htm (480 words) |
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