The perception and production of the English vowels /e/ and /æ/ by native speakers of Serbian

Abstract

The study investigates the perception and production of the English vowels /e/ and /ae/ by native speakers of Serbian. The research consisted of perception and production experiments, whose subjects were the first year students of English at Novi Sad University. The results of the perception tests indicate a poor discrimination level between the two L2 vowels. The production tests reveal that both /e/ and /ae/ occupy the same area in the vowel space in the interlanguage of the subjects. The author concludes that the subjects poorly discriminate between the two L2 vowels because of the trasfer of L1 phonological categories.