This thesis attempts to demonstrate that constraint-based OT (prince and Smolensky, 1993) is well-suited to provide an adequate and explicit analysis of interlanguage data. . . An empirical study of the acquisition ofEnglish word-fmal consonants was conducted in a university in Taiwan. Both Mandarin and Taiwanese share a simple cve syllable, and therefore Mandarin-Taiwanese learners of English are expected to have a certain degree of difficulty in acquiring English word-final consonant clusters. The OT framework is adopted to account for a variety of error patterns observed throughout interlanguage development, particularly in L2 word-final consonant production. The main focuses are that certain constraints are found to be dominant in determining which 'excess' consonant is deleted in a complex cluster, and the issue of how an L2 _. input is formed during L2 acquisition. This thesis also explores what effect linguistic environment has on L2 production: for instance, the· activation of ONSET is regarded as a case of spell out TETU effect under a given environment with a following vowel. The goal of this thesis is to adopt OT as a theoretical framework to examine how error patterns are manifested during L2 acquisition.
