A Typological Study of English Monophthongs Acquisition of EFL Learners in Shandong Dialect Area Region

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the joint effect of dialect and Mandarin on Shandong (SD) English learners’ vowel production from a typological perspective. We focus on the acoustic features of English vowels produced by learners from Jinan (JN), Jining (JNI), Weifang (WF) and Yantai (YT), in comparison with those produced by American English speakers. Ten English monophthongs and three similar vowels are selected as target samples and their corresponding F1 and F2 formants are employed as parameters in the study. Specifically, the results of the three similar vowels show that: /i/ is more affected by dialect for all the cities; /u/ is more affected by dialect for JN and WF learners, while for JNI and YT learners, /u/ is closer to Mandarin than to the dialect and /a/ produced by SD learners is similar to that of American speakers. Further, the Speech Learning Model (SLM) is employed to explain the analysis results.