The Perception and Production of German Vowels by Native English Speakers (2012)

Undergraduate: Amanda Plante

Faculty Advisor: Jennifer Smith
Department: Linguistics

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When native speakers of English study German as a foreign language, they must become able to perceive and produce unfamiliar speech sounds that do not exist in the English phonetic inventory. This research investigated how students in various levels of German coursework heard and pronounced two German front rounded vowels, /y?/ and /ø?/. A listening test was conducted to determine whether students were able to perceive differences between these non-native sounds and similar sounds that do exist in English. Second, a production test was held wherein students were recorded reading German words containing a variety of native and non-native vowels; recordings were then analyzed by native German speakers for pronunciation accuracy. The listening test showed that native English speakers were highly accurate in their ability to discriminate between native and non-native vowel sounds, but they were much less accurate in their pronunciation of these sounds, offering many different substitutions or mispronunciations in their attempts to produce the targeted vowels. These findings indicate that second language perception abilities can far outpace production abilities, especially where orthography patterns heavily influence how non-native speakers attempt to pronounce words.