Experimental Analysis of Monophthongal Vowels Pronunciation Features among College Non-English Majors

Abstract

Vowels occupy an important place in English phonetics, the pronunciation errors of monophthongs will affect the natural communication.College non-English majors learn less knowledge of English phonetics, so there are always many different problems in their pronunciation.This paper selects 60 non-English majors as subjects, uses the analysis methods of Experimental Phonetics and sound software Pratt to extract relevant parameters and analyse the data.By extracting the value of formant and duration, we conclude that there are the gender difference in pronunciation features of monophthongs among the subjects and the regularity is the same to some researches in related literatures.From the value of formant, male subjects master the position of the tongue better, both male and female subjects can not master the front and back position of tongue well, and female are more likely to use retroflex; from the duration, we find that the pronunciation errors of male and female are more consistent, that is the duration of long vowels is too short.