The Perception of Arabic-Accented English Vowels

Abstract

This article examines the intelligibility of the English spoken by Arab speakers of English. This study started from three experiments designed to test whether Malay speakers of English can perceive the selected English vowels produced by an Arabic speaker of English from Oman. The findings suggest that the Arabic-accented English evaluated is generally intelligible to Malay speakers of English. It can be seen that Arabic speaker’s productions of English vowel monophthongs that have Arabic analogs were not necessarily more intelligible than those that lack Arabic counterparts. Though an interference of the L1 vowel system was found, this study does agree with the statement of Flege and Port (1981, p. 133), that “phonetic differences between L1 and L2 will lead to non-L2 phonetic characteristics in the L2 produced by the learners of the L2 language”.