Perception of estonian vowel categories by native and non-native speakers
نویسندگان
چکیده
The aim of the paper is to report on the perception of Estonian vowel categories by L2 learners of Estonian whose L1 is Russian. The Estonian vowel system includes nine vowels whereas Russian has six. Five of the Estonian vowels have counterparts in Russian: /i/, /e/, /u/, /o/ and /a/, the new vowel categories for L2 speakers are /ü/, /ö/, /ä/, and partly /õ/. For the perceptual experiments four-formant vowel stimuli were synthesized including nine Estonian prototype vowels and the intermediate steps between prototypes; the stimulus set covered 14 vowel category boundaries. The experiments involving native Estonian and non-native (Russian as L1) subjects showed that (1) Estonian vowels /i/, /e/, /u/ and /o/ assimilate well with their Russian counterparts; (2) Estonian /a/ and /ä/ assimilate with the allophones of Russian /a/; (3) Estonian /ü/, /ö/ and /õ/ assimilate partly with Russian /ɨ /; due to the close phonetic distance the L2 subjects' ability to discriminate these categories is poor.
منابع مشابه
Production and Perception of Estonian Vowels by Native and Non-Native Speakers
The aim of the paper is to study the production of Estonian vowel categories by L2 speakers of Estonian with a Russianlanguage background and to compare the results with perception data from the same subjects. Ten native Estonian subjects and ten L2 speakers participated in both the reading of an Estonian text corpus and the perception experiment. It was found that mostly the production and per...
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