English vowel perception by Polish listeners

What is it about?

This paper examines how Polish advanced learners of English, who learned English in a classroom, rather than in an English speaking country, perceive English vowels. The participants were asked to perform three tasks: discriminate between English vowels, compare English vowels to Polish vowels and say whether the two chosen English vowels were similar or not. The more difficult it was to discriminate between two given vowels, the more similar these vowels were judged to be. It was easier to discriminate the vowels differing in the tongue height as opposed to the tongue advancement. Unlike in the case of lower proficiency learners, neighboring consonants had little effect on vowel perception. The results were also different from what was reported in other studies for naive listeners.

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