Effects of Arabic Emphatic Environment on the Perception of Plain Consonants in L1 Arabic and L2 English for Arabic Native Learners
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1606.07Keywords:
speech perception, L2 perception, emphatic consonants, plain consonantsAbstract
Although some research has examined the influence of emphatic environments on the perception of plain Arabic segments, little is known about whether this influence extends to the perception of English consonants by Arabic learners of English. Accordingly, the purpose of the present study is to investigate the effects of emphatic consonant environments on the perception of plain consonants in Arabic as a first language and in English as a second language. Fourteen second-language learners of English participated in a forced-choice identification task assessing their perception accuracy of Arabic and English consonants. The results showed that the presence of an emphatic environment (i.e., a plain consonant followed by a low back vowel) led learners to perceive the plain consonants /s/ and /ð/ as emphatic in both Arabic and English stimuli. These findings are discussed in light of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best, 1993) and the revised Speech Learning Model (Flege & Bohn, 2021).
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