A Study of the Effect of Age in the Pronunciation of English Vowels by Spanish Speakers

Abstract

This pilot study examines the role of age in the acquisition of English vowels by six native speakers of Spanish. The speech of three ESL adults and three ESL children were tape recorded and analyzed by 7 judges and the software Multi-Speech. Their speech was analyzed phonologically by using a spectrogram and formant frequency of FI and F2 (in Hz) of each vowel studied creating a basis for a comparison to the standard pronunciation of vowels in English produced by 76 native speakers reported by Peterson and Barney (1952). The final results of this experiment supported the findings by other researchers, which favor the "younger is better" hypothesis (Asher & Garcia, 1968; Fathman, 1975; Fathman & Precup, 1983).