Factors Influencing Serbian EFL Learners’ Production Accuracy of English Interdental Fricatives

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of speech style on production accuracy of English interdental fricatives by Serbian L1 learners of English. In this, it continues an established research tradition in SLA focusing on variation in interlanguage (IL) and, in particular, in IL phonology, developed as a response to conventional studies which tend to assume that a single fixed variant will be categorically substituted for a given L2 target variant by an L1 group. A multivariate account of variation patterns in the production of English interdental fricatives by high school students was used to discover which combinations of internal and external factors (e.g. Preston, 2002; Fasold and Preston, 2007) best account for accurate production of the English interdental fricatives by Serbian learners across three different speech styles.