An Analysis of the Effect of Functional Load on ESL Learners' Perception of Vowel Contrasts

Abstract

Functional load (FL), which ranks segmental contrasts based on their communicative value in pronunciation, is essential to the development of pronunciation instruction in that it indicates the priority of certain segmental contrasts that may seriously affect the intelligibility and comprehensibility of spoken language for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. Despite the widespread use of FL in pronunciation pedagogy for ESL learners, there is little evidence on whether FL affects ESL learners perception of vowel contrasts. In this paper, 20 ESL learners from two Chinese universities are selected to participate in two tasks to observe their performance in discriminating vowel contrasts with different FLs in listening and word pronunciation. The effects of functional load on ESL learners perception of vowel contrasts are investigated in terms of both input and output dimensions. The overall findings indicate that high FL vowel contrasts are more likely to be captured in listening and more consciously distinguished in pronunciation, a piece of evidence proving the necessity of applying FL principle to English pronunciation teaching.