Perception of General British monophthongs

Abstract

The paper presents an experimental study on the perception of the General British monophthongs that was conducted in three stages in 2014–2018. The vowels observed are studied by (i) comparing the vowel systems of General British and Slovene, and (ii) by conducting an experiment on their perception. The analysis focuses on the participants’ overall performance, their most frequent misperceptions, and their progress over the course of one semester. The results indicate: that the previously observed production difficulties mirror perception difficulties; that the discriminative failures of FL vowels are not entirely predictable by comparing vowel systems; that new sound contrasts are assimilated in different ways; and that the participants’ perception of foreign language phonemes can benefit from explicit instruction.