Facilitation and interference of

The concept of Interference and Facilitation
According to the levels of language description we can distinguish:


a) phonetic-phonological interference

b) grammatical interference

c) lexical-semantical interference

The /iː/-/ɪ/-/i/ distinction
French, Italian, Greek, Farsi and most Chinese languages only have the longest of these sounds so that is frequently substituted without a distinction being made, therefore, between the word hit and heat. Other languages, however, do have the intermediate sound /i/ and they include Swedish, Spanish and Catalan, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish (which also has the short sound), Malay / Indonesian and Japanese.For speakers of these languages, the /iː/ sound is more easily produced because it simply involves the slight lengthening of an already familiar phoneme. The facilitation is one worth exploiting in the classroom.Speakers of Dutch, German, Russian, Arabic, South Asian languages and Thai, for example, will have few problems with these phonemes because they are shared in their languages.the fact that the languages have both forms is actually a facilitation factor not granted to speakers of languages such as Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian who do not have the aspirated forms and will pronounce the phoneme /p/ in the initial position more closely to /b/, the /t/ closer to /d/ and the /k/ closer to /ɡ/. This is interference.


Interference and Facilitation in native sounds

/θ/ and /ð/
These sounds are not unique to English but few languages have both so speakers of languages which have one
without the other (such as Catalan and Spanish) with often use only that one whenever either is needed.
Speakers of languages which have neither sound will substitute variably and slightly unpredictably /f/, /z/, /s/, /d/
or even /v/.

/l/ and /r/
It is not the case that these sounds do not exist in some East Asian languages but it is the case that they are not
phonemically distinguished. Speakers of most languages can make the sounds (facilitation) but may not see the
purpose in distinguishing them (interference).Knowing a word also means knowing something of its family so the
full knowledge of the word nation for example, also includes knowledge of international, transnational,
nationalise,national, nationality and maybe more.
There is scope here for both facilitation and interference. Facilitation is also a potential with the nature of
English because it frequently shows quite isolating characteristics.