The relationship between the perception and production of four General British vowels by Slovene university students of English

Abstract

This paper presents a study of the influence of orthography and phonemic transcription on the pronunciation of the four GB vowels /e/, /æ/, /ʌ/, and /ɜ:/ by Slovene university students of English. The paper also examines the relation between the perception and production of the four vowels in question by comparing the perception results of the same vowels from a previous study and the production results of this study. The results indicate a positive influence of phonemic transcription on the production of the examined vowels, whereas the influence of orthography on the pronunciation is confusing and leads to pronunciation errors. The results also confirm the findings of the perception study that the most difficult vowel contrast to maintain is between /e/ and /æ/. Interestingly, the perceived vocalic substitutes do not match the pronunciation substitutes for these two vowels. While the pronunciation of /e/ is excellent, its perception is still confused with /æ/.

Perception of General British monophthongs

“…A closer scrutiny of the wrongly perceived stimuli provides additional backing to the claims by Šuštaršič (2005) and Komar (2017) that the DRESS /e/ and the TRAP /ae/ are sometimes produced as interchangeable by Slovene EFL speakers. In the case of perception, the different positions of speech organs in English and Slovene result in a "perceptual confusion" (Tatham & Morton 2011: 160).…”

“…Concerning the series DRESS /e/, TRAP /ae/, STRUT /ʌ/, and NURSE /ɜ:/, it can be concluded that the previously observed production failures with the vowels /e/ and /ae/ (cf. Šuštaršič 2005;Komar 2017;Čubrović 2017) are also mirrored in the perception of these phonemes. The results for this vowel pair match the findings by Marković (2009) for Serbian, which she attributed to the transfer of L1 phonological categories.…”

“…Baker and Trofimovich (2006) reach a similar conclusion after studying the relationship in a group of Korean learners of English. In the case of Slovene learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), some issues related to the vowel space have been empirically and experimentally attested by Šuštaršič (2005), Stopar (2015; and Komar (2017). Focusing on the typical production and/or perception difficulties of Slovene EFL learners, these studies compare the General British (GB) and Slovene (StS) vowel systems.…”

The Challenges, Methods and Results of Teaching GB Pronunciation to Slovene EFL Students

“…Phonemic transcription not only reflects pronunciation errors resulting from orthographic input, but also develops L2 phonetic awareness in L1 learners. Studies by Wells (1996), Šuštaršič (2005), Lintunen (2005) and Komar (2017) all confirm the positive effect of phonemic transcription on L2 pronunciation of a foreign language with an opaque-grapheme correspondence. The correlation between the phonemic transcription and the pronunciation of consonants is stronger than that between the phonemic transcription and vowels.…”

“…All these strategies are supported by the theory of GB phonology and phonetics. In recent years, several perception and production studies have been conducted (Šuštaršič 2005;Stopar 2015Stopar , 2017Stopar , 2019Komar 2017) and their findings suggest different degrees of overlap between the perception, oral production, spelling and phonemic transcription of sounds.…”