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The Pronunciation Of English Vowels By Native Arabic Speakers: The Relationship Between Age Of Learning, Perception, And Production, Joel Ramez Atallah

Archived Theses and Dissertations

Research on immigrant communities has shown that age of first exposure to a language is strongly correlated with the learner's ultimate attainment in pronunciation. Flege's Speech Learning Model, which hypothesizes a relationship between the foreign accent of late learners and their ability to perceive non-native phonetic contrasts, is one attempt to explain this phenomenon. However, few studies have compared the perception and pronunciation of sounds directly, and there is a paucity of research on age and pronunciation in formal learning environments The present study focussed on the relationship between Age of Learning and the perception and pronunciation of English vowels …