The Correlation between Vowel Production and Vowel Perception as Elicited in the Performance of Adult Iraqi Learners of English: Acoustic Perspective

This paper reports the results of an acoustic study to the correlation between vowel production and vowel perception as performed by adult iraqi learners (ails) of english. the subjects representing the sample group of this work are 24 ( 12 males and 12 females) first- year iraqi students who pursue their b.a. degree in english language and literature at the department of english, college of arts, university of basra (academic year 2011-2012). they live in the city centre of basra and the nearby districts. they are chosen randomly to represent the population of the study with no speaking and hearing defects. they perform a production and a perception tests where a list of 20english tokens is used. for the production experiment, a list of 5 dummy words (randomly chosen to decrease the subjects' tension and hesitation) as well as 20 monosyllabic and disyllabic words containing b.b.c. english pure vowels are randomly arranged to test the subjects' production performance . a perception-based test is designed to examine the participants' perceptibility of the vowels they have already produced. the perception stimuli are recorded on a computer model toshiba nb505 with a cpu speed (1.7) ghz, ram (1.00) gb, and hard disk (222) gb. the recorded material is encoded into a computerized software input (praat) ( version 4.0). this software allows recording speech materials at a speech rate ( 16000 hz) to create wide-band spectrograms accompanied by waveform graphs required for acoustic measurements. the acoustic data are subjected to t-test analysis where two levels of significance are deployed, pvalue equals or less than 0.01(for considerable significance), and p-value equals or less than 0.05 ( when the difference is only significant). mean values and standard deviations for the responses of the vowels groups are also calculated. the main findings of this work are the following: 1- statistical results clearly reveal that there is irregular connection between short/long vowel production and perception.2- learners' performance reflects a higher level of vowel production as compared to their perceptive ability. 3- generally, there is a negative correlation between vowel production and vowel perception. the p-value scored is 0.2 which is more than 0.05 level of significance deployed in the statistical test. 4- statistically, gender variable proves insignificant in the production of short and long vowels. however; it scores a significant value in the perception of short vowels only.