Date of Award

2010

Thesis Type

Masters

Document Type

Dissertation

Divisions

Faculty of Languages and Linguistics

Department

Department of English Language

Institution

University of Malaya

Abstract

Evaluation of speech perception is one of the highly focused research areas in the field of phonetics and phonology. However, there is limited research on the perception of the language produced by the Arabic-speakers of English. Since Arabic is the dominant language, it can be assumed that there is an L1 interference in the English produced by the Arabic speakers. Moreover, with the internationalization of education, there has been an increase in the number of foreign students pursuing their higher education in Malaysia. This provides the rationale for conducting a study on the intelligibility of the English spoken by the Arab speakers of English.

This study started from three experiments designed to test whether Malay speakers of English can perceive the selected English vowels produced by an Arabic speaker of English from Oman. The findings suggest that the Arabic-accented English evaluated are generally intelligible to Malay speakers of English. It can be seen that Arabic speaker’s productions of English vowel monophthongs that have Arabic analogs were not necessarily more intelligible than those that lack Arabic counterparts. Though an interference of the L1 vowel system was found, this study does agree with the statement of Flege and Port (1981, p. 133), that “phonetic differences between L1 and L2 will lead to non-L2 phonetic characteristics in the L2 produced by the learners of the L2 language”. Although the findings presented in this Research Report are preliminary in nature, they contribute to the growing body of research on the perception and production of vowels in different varieties of English.

Initial

khm

Additional Information

Dissertation (M.A.) – Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, 2010.

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