Contrasts in the production of vowels of the English language: A studied carried out with ultrasound and acoustic phonetics techniques
Keywords:
Ultrasound, L2 teaching, L2 Vowels, Acoustic PhoneticsAbstract
Brazilian learners of English have difficulties identifying and producing L2 sounds that are not available in their L1 inventory system of phonemes. This issue has motivated us to conduct a study to evaluate the contrasts in the production of vowels of the English language by a native speaker of English and by a Brazilian. Ultrasound and acoustic phonetics techniques were used in the investigations. The corpus, recorded by a native speaker of English (NS) and one of Portuguese (NNS), was composed of the L2 pair of vowels /ɪ/ and /i/; /ʊ/ and /u/; /ɑ/ and /ʌ/; /ɛ/ and /æ/; /ɔ/ and /ɑ/.The analyses revealed that NNS produced incorrectly the vowel segments /æ/, /ɛ/, /ɑ/, /ʌ/and /u:/. The segments /ɪ/, /i/, /ʊ/ and /ɔ/ were correctly produced. The data bring to light the need to incorporate resources, such as ultrasound techniques, in classes whose focus is to improve the learners' pronunciation.
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