English vowel perception by Polish advanced learners of English

Anna Balas

doi:10.1017/cnj.2018.5

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines English vowel perception by advanced Polish learners of English in a formal classroom setting (i.e., they learnt English as a foreign language in school while living in Poland). The stimuli included 11 English noncewords in bilabial (/bVb/), alveolar (/dVd/) and velar (/gVg/) contexts. The participants, 35 first-year English majors, were examined during the performance of three tasks with English vowels: a categorial discrimination oddity task, an L1 assimilation task (categorization and goodness rating) and a task involving rating the (dis-)similarities between pairs of English vowels. The results showed a variety of assimilation types according to the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) and the expected performance in a discrimination task. The more difficult it was to discriminate between two given vowels, the more similar these vowels were judged to be. Vowel contrasts involving height distinctions were easier to discriminate than vowel contrasts with tongue advancement distinctions. The results also revealed that the place of articulation of neighboring consonants had little effect on the perceptibility of the tested English vowels, unlike in the case of lower-proficiency learners. Unlike previous results for naïve listeners, the present results for advanced learners showed no adherence to the principles of the Natural Referent Vowel framework. Generally, the perception of English vowels by these Polish advanced learners of English conformed with PAM's predictions, but differed from vowel perception by naïve listeners and lower-proficiency learners.

Highlights

Second language learners do not perceive second language speech sounds in a vacuum.1 They have already become “tuned in” to perceiving specific phonetic categories found in their first language and “tuned out” to non-native phonological contrasts
The most dissimilar vowels /e-ʌ/ (2.47), /e-ɪ/ (2.31) and /e-æ/ (2.01) all had discrimination rates higher than 90% and were all categorized into different categories, with the English /e/ categorized as Polish /e/ with goodness of fit rated at 4.8, and /ʌ/, /ɪ/ and /æ/ not falling into the /e/ category; /e/ and the three other vowels in the most dissimilar contrasts were differentiated by the vowel height differences
The language combination and vowels were expected to produce a wide range of assimilation patterns showing how complex advanced L2 vowel perception can be

Summary

Introduction

Second language learners do not perceive second language speech sounds in a vacuum. They have already become “tuned in” to perceiving specific phonetic categories found in their first language and “tuned out” to non-native phonological contrasts. They have already become “tuned in” to perceiving specific phonetic categories found in their first language and “tuned out” to non-native phonological contrasts Researchers studying this phenomenon have devised a number of theoretical models to account for patterns observed in non-native speech perception, to classify the ways non-native phones are discriminated and contrasted in relation to native categories (Best, 1995; Escudero 2005, 2009), and to ascertain how difficult it is for L2 learners to establish new phonetic categories. These models include the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM: Best 1993, 1994a, 1994b, 1995), followed by PAM-L2. We can hypothesize that perceptual attunement to the L1 may prove costly during L2 acquisition when a learner’s L1 has an average 5-7 vowel system (Maddieson 1984: 128), and the L2 has a rich vocalic system of up to more than a dozen vowels

Methods

Results

Conclusion