The Effect of L2 Experience on the Identification of British English Monophthongs by L2 Thai Learners

Abstract

This paper investigates the ability of L2 Thai learners to identify eleven British English monophthongs /iː, ɪ, e, æ, ɒ, ɑː, ɔː, ʊ, uː, ʌ, ɜː/. Among these vowels, /æ/, /iː/, /uː/, /e/ and /ɔː/ are vowels that occur in both Thai and English phonological inventories (shared sounds) whereas the other six vowels occur only in English (non-shared sounds). The subjects were split into two groups of L2 Thai learners: high-experienced and low-experienced. The degree to which L2 experience influenced subjects’ ability to identify British English monophthongs was measured by their ability to match spoken L2 vowels to their written counterparts. The hypotheses of this study were generated from the results of the perceptual assimilation task in the study of Kitikanan (2020). The results showed that the low-experienced group performed poorly, with low identification scores, across all vowels. However, the high-experienced group obtained high scores identifying British English /e/, /ɔː/, /ɪ/ and /ɜː/. The scores of correct identifications for these four British English vowels of the high-experienced group were significantly higher than that of the low-experienced group, suggesting the positive effect of the L2 experience. For other vowels, the scores of both groups were not significantly different from one another. The predictions of the perceptual assimilation task failed to predict most results. These results might imply the need for other means to compare L1 and L2 sounds to understand the mechanism regarding the identification ability of the L2 sounds. They may also suggest that some vowels are easier to learn than others.