Production and perception of English consonants by Yemeni EFL learners

Abstract

Many previous studies on the perception-production correlation focused mainly on transcriptions and native English speaker evaluations for production accuracy assessments; only a few included acoustic measurements. The purpose of this study is to examine the production and perception of six English consonants by Yemeni EFL learners of English using an acoustic measurement of L2 production in order to better understand the link between production and perception. It has three objectives: (1) To investigate the extent to which word position influences the accuracy of Yemeni EFL learners’ production of the target consonants, (2) to examine the extent to which word position affects their perception, and (3) to examine the relationship between the overall production and perception of the investigated sounds. A quantitative research method was employed to collect data from six Yemeni EFL postgraduate students from Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM). In the production tasks, the speakers were asked to produce seventy-two words with the target consonants three times in isolation (Experiment 1) and the other three times in a carrier sentence (Experiment 2). The researchers recorded the speakers’ productions with an iPhone and later evaluated them acoustically via Praat. In the perception test, an AXB experiment was conducted. The stimuli were read by a native male speaker of Australian English. The findings showed that word position significantly affected the production, yet not the perception of the target sounds. Moreover, an insignificant positive moderate correlation was revealed between the overall production and perception of the target consonants. Results have implications for L2 speech and pronunciation instruction and learning. Teachers may focus more on specific sound environments that lead learners to struggle while producing/perceiving particular English sounds.