چكيده
In modern societies, being able to speak a second or even a third language is of great importance, in particular, the pronunciation of vowels. Accurate pronunciation of vowels is important for most people, whether they live in an English speaking country, or those who learn the language in their motherland as a foreign language. When learning a language, learners may face problems among which is gaining native like accent. Among cross-linguistic vowel space analysis, none is done with Persian learners of English. Therefore, in the present study, our aim is to conduct a contrastive analysis of Persian and English vowel spaces, which the former is directly drawn from standard Persian speakers producing six Persian vowels, and the latter is adopted from Ladefoged and Maddison’s study (1996). Subsequently, two other vowel spaces of Persian EFL learners, who pronounce nine English vowels, are drawn. Therefore, the purposes of this study is first a contrastive analysis of English and Persian vowel spaces, and second the pedagogical analysis of how the similarities and differences between the two languages’ vowel spaces may influence the process of learning a second language (English). The study is done in the light of two theories of language learning, namely, Best’s Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) and Flege’s Speech Learning Model (SLM). In the present study, all data are recorded and analyzed via PRAAT software (Version 5.3.22). At the time of recording all participants are in a quiet room where there is no interruption in the process of recording and there is no distraction. Only each participant and the researcher are present in the room. Participants read a list of nine separate declarative sentences in print, which all are of the same length with the same intonation pattern. A Persian list comprising six sentences is provided to Persian participants. With the first and second formant frequencies of each vowel, which is calculated from Praat, the vowel spaces are drawn to be analyzed. We find that because Persian and English vowel spaces comprises different vowels and some vowels in English are absent in Persian vowel inventory, namely [], [] and [], learners’ first language interferes with the learning of some English vowels like [], [], [] and [] according to SLM.
