An Acoustic Analysis of English Vowels Produced by Male and Female Iraqi EFL Learners

Abstract

A lot of studies showed that males and females vary in their production of English vowels as a result of biological variances in their vocal tract. These differences cause a challenge when they are employed for an instrumental analysis of speech sounds including male and female speakers. The primary aim of the present study is to provide experimental evidence for certain linguistic causes of production errors of English vowels spoken by Iraqi English foreign language learners at university level. It is a mixed mode research which concentrates on acoustic analysis and gender-related differences, as well as comparing native to non-native production of vowels. To achieve these aims, sixty Iraqi participants (30 males and 30 females) (selected by using purposive sampling method) who are university EFLLs were recruited to perform a speech production task of the eleven English vowels in a /hVd/ context embedded in a carrier sentence (say… again). The data were analyzed using Praat software to extract first and second formant frequencies and vowel duration for each vowel. Lobanov ANAE Method (2006) was followed to normalize F1 and F2 values. The data were compared to data from research projects (Wells,1992 and Deterdings, 2006) looking at the English vowels produced by native speakers. The collected data were statistically analyzed by implementing two processes of statistical analysis. The first process is the descriptive statistics, such as manual input of data and display them as bar charts that were done using Excel sheets. This was carried out to quantify the data obtained. The second process was inferential statistics, such as independent-sample t-test that was achieved using, SPSS software. It was conducted, to identify if the results reveal any statistical significance. The results showed that Iraqi EFLLs produced the targeted vowels shorter than native English speakers. In terms of vowel quality, they produced lower and more fronted vowels than the control group. In addition, this study revealed that there are statistically significant cross-gender differences between male and female Iraqi EFL learners in the production of English vowels. It is concluded that learners’ gender plays a considerable role in their production of English vowels.