filtering L2 features. These L2 vowels with no counterpart are considered the most marked vowels (MDH term) in L1 and were automatically the most difficult to discriminate, yielding serious confusions. Less marked or unmarked vowels either yielded less serious confusions or no confusion at all.
The good mapping of the high tense and lax vowels for the nonnative learners in the present study conforms with other studies that reported Arabic vowel inventory to have such features, and that differences in Arabic vowel inventory are not exclusive to duration but also involve differences in vowel quality for the short/long counterparts. A detailed comparison of the native results with the nonnative results shows that native listeners attach more equal weight to quality and duration in the mental representation of the AE vowels, whereas nonnatives depend more on duration as a reliable cue for mapping AE vowels, while only partially taking quality into consideration. Arguably, even if incorrect representations based on duration differences comprise most of the serious confusions (in the tense-lax contrast), they can still be corrected more easily than confusions in quality differences if targeted and explicit learning tasks in the teaching process are employed.
Despite the fact that AE low back vowels are supposed to be NEW sounds for PA learners by definition, they were more correctly mapped by nonnative learners than by the natives.
However, this good mapping will not help L2 learners much because many American native speakers have merged these vowels into a single category. On the other hand, other NEW sounds were the most problematic to discriminate and the most difficult to be correctly mapped, which support L2LP postulations in this context for NEW sounds.
varieties of Arabic (Al-Ani, 1970; Watson, 2002). The consequence of this finding would be that the English tense-lax contrast should not present a special problem for Palestinian Arabic learners of English, at least in so far as the high vowels are concerned.
The PA learners have a fairly correct representation of the tense high vowels /i/ and /u/.
These tense vowels are properly separated from their lax counterparts /ɪ/ and /ʊ/, respectively.
However, then the problems begin. The lax high-mid vowels take up far too much space and usurp the area that should be allotted to the mid vowels /ɛ/ and /ɔ/. Presumably, the PA learners believe that the vowel in pot is a short/lax mid vowel /ɔ/ as in British English (rather than the open tense vowel /ɑ/ of AE). As a result of this misconception, the entire mid section of the vowel space is taken up by the conjoined categories /ɪ/ & /ɛ/ for short front vowels and /ʊ/ &
/ɑ/ for short back vowels. Long mid vowels are identified as tokens of AE tense /e/ in the front half, and as tense /o/ in the back half of the mid section. Then, all low vowels, including /æ/, together form one conjoined vowel category /ʌ/ (which is not even fully open) when the duration is short. Low vowels are identified as /æ/ only if extremely front and long.
Although all AE vowels were used as response alternatives by the PA participants and no missing islands appeared (as noted in Figure 4.6), the perceptual assimilation of AE pure vowels is clearly dissected to mirror a tense-lax contrast influenced by the short-long contrasts that exist in PA, and the L2 short/lax mid vowels section, which has no (near)counterparts in PA, are perceived as extensions to their nearest short/lax high vowels. Mainly, learners were only sensitive to vowel duration rather than vowel quality. This in return indicates a massive uncertainty, in the mind of PA learners, of what the AE vowels should sound-like. The present results provide clear evidence of L1 interference in L2 perceptual assimilation and identification. Moreover, some studies have reported that the listeners’ perception of native and nonnative sounds acoustically match the properties of their native language (Escudero, 2005;
Escudero & Vasiliev, 2011; Escudero & Williams, 2011). Nonetheless, there are some pieces of evidence that suggest a developing language faculty in the minds of the PA learners where they clearly differentiate between adjacent vowels; their configuration of the slight differences between these vowels will eventually make them able to adjust their perceptual representation of the AE vowels correctly, especially for the tense/lax contrast.
The results from the previous chapter also support these tendencies. In the previous experiment (PAM-test), I reported that most of the difficulties in perceiving the AE vowel inventory were in vowels that do not have a clear counterpart in PA rather than in vowels with (near)equivalents. It is clear that duration is depended upon as the primary cue that keeps the tense and lax vowels apart for the PA learners, rather than vowel color, which is what natives
do depend on. Nevertheless, the PAM results indicate that some reallocations of stimuli to their (correct) places involve sensitivity to vowel color, not just to duration, for the nonnative PA learners.
In the broader picture, these results should have an echo in the production part of the L2. As a rule of thumb, learners could not possibly acquire a good production of the AE vowels unless their perceptual representation of the L2 vowel phonemes is correct, which principle should be applicable to any L2. The results from this chapter and the previous one provide a view on the mental image that L2 learners have of the vowels in the TL, which is helpful in confirming the consistency and the correlation of making errors in both perception and production.
Accordingly, I expect substantial errors in speech production for the PA learners, which can be connected back to their perception mistakes. Presumably, such production mistakes can be fixed if a better perception is developed.