An Empirical Study On RP Vowel Perception And The Relationship Between Perception And Production For English Major Freshmen

This study aims at investigating the perception of 20 RP vowels of 116 English major freshmen and verifying the relationship between vowel perception and vowel production.The RP vowel perception test was conducted by asking subjects to transcribe the vowels inserted in carrier words. Every carrier word was pronounced by two different speakers in order to increase within-category variations. The results show that the overall accuracy of perception is 85.5%. Central vowels and closing diphthongs have best accuracies of 92.4% and 95.5%, and back vowels and centering vowels are poorly perceived with accuracies of 73.6% and 80.4%. In terms of perceptual accuracy of single vowel, front vowels/e/and/ae/, and back vowels /p/and/u:/are worst perceived.By comparing the results of an acoustic analysis and an error distribution analysis of 24 token pairs which were statistically screened out for subjects’ significantly different accuracies, this study tries to summarize three possible explanations for subjects’ perceptual failure:1) representations of phonetic categories of RP vowels have not been stably established in most subjects’long-term memory, which leads to misperception of some within-category variations; 2) subjects tend to first rely on duration when recognizing some vowels; 3) subjects probably rely more on two stable vowel parts than the glide to recognize some diphthongs.Correlation test of subjects’ vowel perception and vowel production revealed a strong positive relation in general, which means a subject with better perpetual accuracy may have better pronunciation, or vice versa.Results of this study can be seen as feedbacks on current pronunciation teaching and training in ECNU, and can inspire teachers to adjust their teaching foci in practice.