How Are British English Vowels Perceived? Evidence from Yemeni EFL Learners
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The current study examines the perception of the British English (BE) vowels by Yemeni EFL undergraduate learners. Specifically, all the BE vowels (except schwa) were investigated to explore the most misperceived English vowels by 67 EFL learners at different proficiency levels- beginners, intermediate and advanced. A perception test, which measured the learners’ perception of the of BE vowels, and a questionnaire, which mainly measured participants’ level of difficulty they experience in perceiving these English sounds, were used to collect data from the learners. Overall, the results revealed that the vowels of BE present a serious problem to Yemeni EFL learners as they could not identify these non-native speech sounds with high rates of correct perceptions. More specifically, it was found that lower- and higher-level learners showed similar misperception patterns of the BE vowels whereby they had the greatest difficulty in perceiving /eə, / æ/, /e /, / ɒ /, and /ʌ. Generally, in addition to the learning context, the teaching aids and the perceptual training, the misperceptions of BE vowels might also be due to the closeness and similarity existing among these English vowel segments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".