A study on the production-perception link of English vowels produced by native and non-native speakers

This study explored the relationship between the production of the nine English vowels and the perception of synthesized vowels by thirty-five American, Chinese, and Korean, male and female speakers. The average formant values of the ten American English speakers were employed to synthesize the nine vowels that were presented to the thirty-five speakers. The center formant values of the highest and lowest formant boundary of the same vowel quality were collected and compared to the formant values of their productions. We found that there was a strong correlation between production and perception within and across the language groups. The American group had higher coefficients than the Chinese or Korean groups. The lower coefficients were related to the non-native speakers’ deviant production of the English vowels. In the cross-linguistic comparison, the American, Chinese and Korean groups perceived the stimuli about the same. Individual comparison by regressional analyses of the formant frequency data of the produced vowels and the center formant values of the perceptual test led to a very remarkable r value. This suggests a very lawful relationship between production and perception.