A Study of the Distinction of English Mid-Front Vowels by Taiwanese EFL Learners in Correlation with their Listening Competence

Linguistic Analysis, Fall 2021, NTNU

Final Term Paper

Title

A Study of the Distinction of English Mid-Front Vowels by Taiwanese EFL Learners in Correlation with their Listening Competence

Abstract

In Taiwanese Mandarin, /e/ and /ɛ/ are in complementary distribution, while in English, they are in contrastive distribution. Given that, Taiwanese EFL learners’ mid-front vowel distinction ability and their listening competence are examined to see the correlation. This study designed an experiment to measure their vowel distinction ability, and adopted their English proficiency test for one’s listening competence. The result displays that two variables are significantly correlated. Besides, participants tended to make judgments merely depending on explicit vowel letters, confused all front vowels together, and/or think English and Chinese follow their own independent phonetic system so the vowels of each language are not interchangeable.

Term Paper (23 Pages)

110-1 LA Term Paper (Hsing-Hung Yeh)

Assignments

Note

  • The assignments displayed here are the version annotated and graded by my instructor Professor Joy Wu, which implies some mistakes or even errors might exist and have not yet been revised.

  • Below are the core topics regarding each assignment.

    • HW_1 Phonology

    • HW_2 Morphology and Morphological Analysis

    • HW_3 Morphology and Morphological Analysis

    • HW_4 Grammatical Relation

    • HW_5 Semantics (Conversational Maxims)