Typology of Convergences and Divergences of English Monophthongs by EFL Learners from Guanhua Regions

This paper makes a comparative study of acoustic features of English vowels by English as a Foreign Language Learners (EFL learners) from Guanhua dialectal region and native English speakers in a typological perspective. We focus on exploring the degree of phonetic transfer of dialects onto English (L2). Eleven English monophthones, e.g., the corner vowels /i/, /u/, /a/, are selected as target samples and their corresponding F1&F2 formants are employed as parameters in the study. The Speech Learning Model (SLM) is adopted to examine the differences caused by different dialectal accents. Results show a great divergence between EFL learners in all four dialects and American (AM) native speakers, with regard to the tongue position of vowels. Specifically, /i/, /u/ and /a/ are affected by BJ and XA dialects, which can be explained by the SLM. On the other hand, /u/ produced by JN and HEB learners is similar to that by American speakers. Therefore, for L2 learning, all the four dialects from the Guanhua region could affect the learners’ L2 vowel systems.