Quote:
Originally Posted by Etoile
Language learners usually apply what they're familiar with anyway. Cueing a foreign language with Cued American English would result in a person speaking Spanish with an American accent, wouldn't it? The reason people have accents when speaking another language is because they're applying the sounds they grew up with to a foreign language.
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Good point. You would be cuing the structure of Spanish based on English phonetic principles which would result in the language being spoken with English pronunciation. But the whole idea of becoming fluent in another language is to speak it so that native speakers are able to understand and respond to your communications. So all structures of the language need to be learned as applied to that particular language. For instance, very few kids coming out of a high school Spanish class could go to a Sapnish speaking country and make themselves understood without difficulty unless they were taught by a fluent speaker and concentrated not only on syntax and pragmatics, but pronunciation, as well. So to accurately cue Spanish, one would need to use a phonetic system specific to Spanish.