Abstract
Perceptual assimilation is a well-known task; however, there is no study on the assimilation pattern of the English monophthongs by L2 Thai learners. The aims of this study are to explore the perceptual assimilation patterns of the British English monophthongs to Thai monophthongs by L2 Thai learners and to examine the effect of L2 experience on this perception. The target British English sounds were /iː, ɪ, e, æ, ɒ, ɑː, ɔː, ʊ, uː, ʌ, ɜː/ in /bVt/ context. The Thai listeners performed an assimilation task by matching these British English monophthongs with their L1 Thai monophthongs. The results showed no difference in the assimilation patterns between the high-experienced and low-experienced groups in the perception of the English /ɪ, e, ɑː, ɔː, ʊ, ʌ, ɜː/. The degree of the perceived similarity in the matching of these vowels to the Thai sound categories between these two groups was not significantly different from one another either. However, English /e/ was mostly perceived as Thai /e/ in the high-experienced group to a greater degree than the low-experienced group. The findings also showed the difference in the assimilation patterns between these two groups, i.e. for English /æ, iː, uː, ɒ/ suggesting the importance of the L2 experience in the exploration of the L2 speech learning research. The implication for L2 sound learning of this study is that having higher number of phonemes in the L1 phonological system than that in the L2 one is less important than the L2 experience. 
Highlights
1.1 Rationale of the StudyOne of the main aims of second language (L2) phonology is to understand the mechanisms associated with learning L2 sounds
As the main aim of this study is to explore the perceptual assimilation patterns of English monophthongs with the Thai monophthongs and the effect of L2 experience, there are three research questions and hypotheses for this study: 1) Are shared English sounds assimilated to the similar Thai sounds? The hypothesis was that the shared vowels in English: /i, e, æ, ɔ, u/ would be assimilated to the same Thai vowels of the same IPA symbols due to the similarity in target-likeness
Regarding the hypothesis for the shared sounds that L2 sounds can be assimilated to L1 when both are represented by the same IPA symbol is partially supported by the following results: 1) the English /æ/ was mostly matched with the Thai /æ/ in the high-experienced group; 2) the English /i/ was mostly matched with the same vowel in the high-experienced group; 3) the English /e/ was mostly matched with the same vowel in both groups; and 4) the English /u/was mostly matched with the same vowel in the high-experienced group
Summary
1.1 Rationale of the StudyOne of the main aims of second language (L2) phonology is to understand the mechanisms associated with learning L2 sounds. In the perceptual assimilation task, there are two processes: investigating the perceived similarity with the classification of the L2 sounds in terms of the closest L1 sounds (assimilation task) and exploring the degree of the similarity between L1 and L2 sounds using a rating scale (goodness rating). This task is commonly used to predict the results for the identification task and discrimination task which are the tasks to explore the performance in L2 perception. The pair of English monophthongs cannot be UU assimilation for the L1 Thai learners as there was monophthongs in elt.ccsenet.org
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