Perception of Arabic and English Vowels Arabs

This study intends to investigate the effects of experience L2 sound patterns and interference on the perception of English Vowels. Thus, natural vowel stimuli of both Arabic and English Vowels were generated for the purpose of this study. Arabic stimuli were presented to native Arabic speakers who showed a highly significant identification scores. The English test material was presented to two groups of Arabs learning English : (1) realitively inexperienced in English: and (2) experienced group. The two groups of listeners performed very well in the identification task of Arabic-like-English vowels whereas they differ significantly in their perceptual task of the non-Arabic like ones. Yet, in the final analysis of the results both groups fell short of the native norm in the identification of the non-native-like vowels with other non-native-like ones but not with Arabic-like ones is found in the responses of the two groups. This implies that non-Arabic-like stimuli are not identified with Arabic-like ones as is assumed by contrastive analysts. Thus, new vowel segment is not easy to aquire since vowel i:flonemes are composed of complex auditory, acoustic and perceptual features.