COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE ACOUSTIC VOWEL SPACE OF EGYPTIAN ENGLISH VOWELS AND GENERAL AMERICAN ENGLISH VOWELS

This study provides cross-language comparisons of Egyptian English and General American English (GAE) vowels. The main purpose of this study is to determine the intelligibility of Egyptian speakers in comparison with GAE speakers. In order to implement this comparison, eleven GAE vowels in /hVd / contexts produced by five male and five female Egyptian speakers were analyzed acoustically using Praat software. The results reveal that Egyptian speakers ’ production of GAE vowels is affected by the Egyptian vowel system. While some GAE vowels are easy for Egyptians to pronounce intelligibly, others such as /æ, ɛ, o, ɔ, ɑ/, are difficult to produce close to the standard American English pronunciation. Intelligible pronunciation is a fundamental part of speaking any language. Adult language learners cannot achieve native-like phonology in their L2 (Strange, Yamada, Kubo, Trent, Nishi, and Jenkins, 1998; Munro, 1993). Ladefoged (2006) stated that there are many factors that may cause accent; however, differences in vowel pronunciation ar