Discusses a study of attitudes of U.S. bilingual and Spanish-speaking learners of English toward native and non-native speech samples. Demonstrates that error hierarchies (the ranking of errors by comprehensibility, irritation, or other criteria) based on language attitudes are tentatively valid with reference to very low language ability. (SED)

Studies the role played by native language transfer and task formality in the second-language acquisition of the Spanish voiced stop phonemes /b d g/ and their spirantized variants to identify specific problems affecting learners. Results indicate that native language transfer markedly inhibits acquisition of the voiced spirants. (21 references)…