Analysis on Sichuan College Students’ Segmental Phoneme Errors

The negative transfer of mother tongue has a big influence on the students in Sichuan when they learn English pronunciation. Based on the contrast analysis and error analysis theory, this paper analyzes the recordings of students’ oral English test and summarizes the errors the students make when they learn the segmental phonemes: 1) Students use phonemes in Sichuan dialect to take place those similar in English; 2) Students confuse nasal consonant [n-] with lateral consonant [l-]; 3) Students find it difficult to distinguish ending consonants [-n] and [-η]; 4) A lot of students can not pronounce [r] correctly; 5) Few of the students pay attention to the quality differences of long vowels and short vowels; 6) Many students mispronounce the combinations of consonants [f, v, s, z, r, h, k, g] + [i, i:]; 7) In [s + p/t/k] combination, students give a strong aspiration for [p/t/k]; 8) Students like to add a vowel sound in the consonant clusters; 9) They sometimes add a vowel after the ending consonants.