An Acoustic Study on the Acquisition of English Back Vowels by Lhasa Tibetan Students

Abstract

It has long been observed that second language learners who natively speak different languages typically present different phonetic features while speaking a second language, because the acquisition of another language after a complete grasp of the mother tongue will be affected by the phonetic system of the mother language. Thus this paper mainly explores the phonetic features and the rules of mother tongue transfer in Lhasa Tibetan students’ acquisition of English back vowels by means of acoustic experiment and auditory discrimination experiment.