An Empirical Study of English Vowels Acquisition of EFL Learners in Tianjin and Zibo

This paper aims to investigate the convergence and divergence on the acquisition of English vowels from a typological perspective. We focus on the acoustic features of monophthongs produced by speakers learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The learners are mainly from non-Mandarin areas, e.g., Tianjin (TJ) and Zibo (ZB) dialectal areas, both of which belong to the Jilu dialect area. The acoustic features of vowels produced by learners' are examined in comparison with those produced by American (AM) English speakers. The research further explores the degree of phonetic transfer of dialects (L1) and Mandarin (L2) to English (L3). Ten English monophthongs and three similar vowels (/i/, /u/, and /a/) are selected as target samples. Specifically, the results of the three similar vowels show that: for ZB learners, /i/ and/a/ are more affected by Mandarin; /u/ is more similar to dialect; while for TJ learners, /a/ and /i/ are closer to dialect, and /u/ is more affected by Mandarin. The Speech Learning Model (SLM) is further employed to explain the analysis results.