Els universals lingüístics i el marcatge en l’ensenyament de la pronunciació del català com a llengua estrangera

Abstract

This paper explores how language universals and typological markedness can contribute to the process of teaching and learning the vowel system and the intonational phonology of Catalan as a second language. When compared to the languages with which Catalan is in contact, we conclude that its relative typological markedness is moderate. We further identify areas of difficulty for learners: the contrast between open- and close-mid vowels, the production of schwa, and the slight majority presence of high or rising pitch accents and of yes-no questions with falling intonation. These results can have important implications for teaching and learning Catalan pronunciation. The first implication can be applied to the design of curricula, and hinges upon the order of acquisition of structures: the least marked structure should be first introduced. The second implication has to do with the direction of linguistic generalizations during acquisition, and can be applied to the explicit teaching of structures in which there is an implicational relationship between them.Finally, we highlight the need to gather evidence to either support or falsify the hypotheses formulated from the typological markedness approach to second language acquisition defended in this paper.