Abstract:

English vowels cause major problems to Turkish English majors because Turkish and English vowel inventory do not match to a great extent. Turkish phonetic and phonological system has a significant impact on the perception and production of English individual vowels and vowel contrasts. In this respect, vowels, which carry the heart of syllables and words, fossilization in pronunciation and intonation get to be inescapable. The paper aims to find out the auditory difficulty of the order of the problem-causing English vowel phonemes for the Turkish-English majors and to determine to what rate can the non-native speaking participant distinguish such vowel sounds and match them with their IPA signs when heard in isolation within given oral stimuli. This research was designed to identify auditory perception rates of Turkish-English majors on English problem-causing vowel segmental phonemes by 39 heterogeneous pre-intermediate English freshmen majors whose basic background on English was different in a private university in Ankara, Turkey. A pre-test was constructed wherein English problem-causing vowel phonemes were used as auditory stimuli in isolation, and the participants were asked to match the IPA signs and phonemes articulated by the researcher. Since the participants had serious perception and phonetic coding difficulties of vowels in the pre-test, a three-hour teaching treatment was administrated to them. After waiting two weeks, the same pre-test was administrated as a post-test, the results of which were submitted to SPSS 20 to determine the difficulty rates of English problem-causing vowel phonemes for pre-intermediate Turkish-English majors. The rate of the order of difficulty signaled that the vowel phonemes of English inventory that did not exist in Turkish were problematic for Turkish English majors: [ɪ], with a perception rate of 66, 67% [ɑ]; with a perception rate of 48,72%, and [ə], with a perception rate of 48,72%. The results of the present study give supporting evidence to the SLM of Flege (1995) in relation to categorical sound perception and discrimination pattern.

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