An acoustic analysis of English vowels produced by speakers of seven different native-language backgrounds

Abstract

We measured F1, F2 and duration of ten English monophthongs produced by American native speakers and by Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Hungarian and Chinese L2 speakers. We hypothesized that (i) L2 speakers would approximate the English vowels more closely as the phonological distance between the L2 and English is smaller, and (ii) English vowels of L2 speaker groups will be more similar as the L2s are closer to one another. Comparison of acoustic vowel diagrams and Linear Discriminant Analyses (LDA) confirm the hypotheses, with one exception: Dutch speakers deviate more from L1 English than the Scandinavian groups. he Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit was convincingly simulated by the LDA