Experimental Study On Mongolian Students' English Vowel Acquisition

This thesis examines Mongolian students'English vowel acquisition through an acoustic analysis. The contrastive analysis between Mongolian and English phonological systems makes it possible to investigate the language transfer effect on Mongolian learners'English vowel acquisition and the interlanguage properties of Mongolian learners'English vowel pronunciation in the process of English learning.This study attempts to answer the following three questions:(1) what are the differences between English and Mongolian basic vowel patterns? (2) is there language transfer from Mongolian learners'mother tongue to their English vowel acquisition? (3) what are the features of Mongolian learners'English intervowels?6 second year students (3 females,3 males) of Inner Mongolian University for the Nationalities and two American native speakers (a male and a female) from New York participated in this research. TOSHIBA L536 was used for recording, and Praat speech analyzing software was used to obtain the first and second format frequencies (F1 and F2). Excel is employed to draw the vowel diagrams according to the formant frequencies extracted by Praat.Firstly, the basic vowels of English and Mongolian were compared according to their F1 and F2 and the vowel patterns of the two languages were obtained. Secondly, according to Praat description and Excel diagrams, the vowel patterns of English and Mongolian were compared. Finally, Mongolian learners' English vowel acoustic diagrams were drawn to assist the author to analyze Mongolian learners'English vowel acquisition and their intervowel features. This thesis presented the differences between English and Mongolian basic vowel patterns, the native language transfer effect on Mongolian learners'English vowel acquisition, the features of Mongolian learners' intervowels and some practical suggestions for English teaching to Mongolian students.