Phonological constraints as filters in second language acquisition: An

empirical study on vowel production and perception.

Na1c0014 李羿霈

An acoustic perspective of English vowel production and perception by Taiwanese EFL learners, as compared with native speakers of English.

It aims to explore the issue of phonological constraints as filters in second language acquisition.

Introduction

L2 learners are confronted with certain problems in L2 speech learning.

Linguistic factors as L1 influence and similarity effect help account for the perceived accent.

By Optimality Theory, it aims to demonstrate the phonological constraints as filters in second language acquisition and to elaborate the issue of learnability for the English learners in Taiwan.

Background of the study

English speaking and listening are the mail skills for the beginners of English(MOE, 2001).

Students in Taiwan, have some problems in pronunciation and perception of English sounds.

Students are unable to discriminate vowels with accuracy, like tense vowels/ i, u, ow/ and lax vowels/Ԑ,ᴐ/.

Motivation

Acoustic measurements of perception and production

Productive as well as perceptual vowel space as a reflection of learners’ interlanguage

A close link between perception and production

The application of OT in SLA

Four key assumptions

It aims to investigate the relationship between production and perception of American English vowels by Taiwanese EFL students and to elaborate the issue of learnability in the sense of OT.

Purposes

To what extent English vowel production by TS differ from that by NS in terms of mean acoustic values in vowels?

To what extent does English vowel perception by TS differ from that by NS in terms of mean synthesized acoustic values in vowels?

To what extent does English vowel production-perception asymmetry by TS differ form that by NS in terms of mean acoustic values in vowels?

To what extent can OT account for the issue of learnability in the empirical findings in English vowel production and perception by TS?

Research Questions

Second language acquisition Interlanguage Acoustic Phonetics Vowel Quality Vowel Normalization Optimality Theory(OT) Production and perception of vowels

Terms of Definition

Southern Min, Mandarin and English Tenseness feature and the backness feature

in different vowel systems

Phonological comparison

Literal Review Chung(1996, 2002, 2006) proclaims,

sgnificant similarities as well as differences among these three languages can be observed in terms of the two features： [+/-back] and [+/- high]

English diphthongs refers to the tongue position during the vowel articulation

To aquire the English or Mandarin diphthongs,

violate the Southern Min patterns.

sixty Taiwanese EFL students were bilinguals with Southern Min and Mandarin

a) HEFL-30 English majors in National Kaohsiung Normal University

b) LEFL-30 students of 12th grade in Chien-Chen Senior High School in Kaohsiung

Twenty native speakers of American English

Subjects-Participants

A production experiment(Appendix A)

A perception experiment(Appendix B)

A questionnaire(Appendix D)

Subjescts-Instruments

The questionnaire was gathered by group meetings, in which the general English proficiency test was also conducted.

As for the production experiment and individual perception experiment, they were done by individual interviews and tape-recording.

PRAAT program, ACCESS program, EXCELL and SPSS software were utilized in it.

Subjects- Procedures

Interlanguage production vs. interlanguage perception

LEFL learners were interfered more by L1. In HEFL pronunciation of similar English vowels, there was less deviance from NS English production than from their L1 correspondent production.

Less similarity effect was identified in the perception task.

Conclusions

Compared with NS, TS exhibited a greater degree of within-group production- perception asymmetry

OT, is supported both at the phonological level and at the phonetic level. At the phonological level, variability among the production and perception grammars could be respectively modeled by different rankings of the same phonological constraint sets.

Conclusions