Phonetic Differences Between Spanish And English

Spanish and English have a similar alphabet, but the phonologies of the two languages have several differences. For this reason, some Spanish learners get in trouble in English pronunciation. For example, as Gorman and Kester (n.d.) stated, Spanish and English share several consonantal phonemes including the stop sounds /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, /g/, the nasals /m/, /n/, the fricatives /s/, /f/, the liquid /l/, the glide /w/, /j/, and the glottal /h/. Despite these common phonetic symbols, it is important to note that there are differences in voicing, aspiration, and precise place of articulation for many of these sounds that result in acoustic differences (p.8).
As the authors clearly stated, English and Spanish languages poses similar sounds
According to Gorman and Kester (n.d.) there are two Spanish phonemes that do not exist in English. “The phoneme /x/ represents a voiceless sound produced with velar frication. The phoneme /b/ represents a voiced bilabial fricative” (p.10). It is evident how those differences between English and Spanish could affect the pronunciation of Spanish speaker in their target language.
Also, there are other examples in which there are English sounds that are no produced in Spanish and, for this reason, Spanish learners get in trouble pronouncing some words that contain those sounds. For example, the English fricative sounds such as the th sound are not primary phonemes in Spanish, and English speakers develop those sounds later. Therefore, people who are learning English find difficult to pronounce these sounds (Gorman & Kester, n.d., p.10). As a result, “an English language learner may pronounce the words “think” as “tink” and “cloth” as “clot.” Similarly, “this” may be produced as “dis” (Gorman & Kester, n.d., p.10). It is clear how Spanish speakers confused the dental fricative voiced and voiceless sounds: /ð/ and /θ/ with others similar sounds in Spanish. Also it is important to notice that the Th writing structure is known as a consonant cluster and the Spanish language do not have this kind of structure inside. As a consequence, Spanish speakers are not familiarizing
This kind of aspiration is heard in the final voiceless continuants like the dental fricative voiceless sounds /θ/, but this does not happen in the voiceless stop sounds (Dale & Poms, 1986, p 101). However, many students do not applied those rules when they pronounce some words. According to Dale and Poms (1986) “many ESL students do; however, [some students are] try[ing] to aspirate final consonants other than voiceless continuants” (p.105). Therefore, it is evident how many students tend to aspirate all the final words when they learn the rule. Also, other students have a tendency to avoid the strong aspiration of final consonants. As a matter of fact, the pronunciation problems are related to the misproduction of the aspiration of the beginning and at the end of the words, so the final English message could be