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Measurement Of Esl Saudi Learners

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VOT Measurement of ESL Saudi Learners’ English Stops /p/ and /b/
1. Background:
A. Introduction: Languages make meaningful words by combining sound segments depending on rules. Children try to acquire these sounds through listening. By the time goes on, they have a linguistics competence that helps them produce meaningful sounds. Students who learn a second language or a foreign language face issues due to the different phonetic system of their first language and the second language. If they have a sound in the target language is not exist in their mother tongue, they produce it like the closest sound they have in their first language (Ahmad 2011). Trubetzkoy (1939) mentioned that a language phonological system is “ as a …show more content…

The Phonetic Inventory of Saudi Arabic Many research papers have talked about measuring stop consonants voicing. There are many researchers put their attention on figuring out the difficulties of pronouncing voicing and voiceless consonants by L2 learners such as (Binturki, 2008; Flege and Port, 1981; Al-Saidat, 2010). The difference between voicing and voiceless consonants is the voicing that occurs during the stop closure interval. The consonant is voiced when there is voicing, while if there is no voicing, the consonant is voiceless. However, Lisker and Abramason (1964) do not see that consonant stops (p, b, t, d, k, g) could be distinguished depending on a distinction feature like the vocal cords voicing. For that reason, they proposed a distinction feature between voiced and voiceless consonants which is Voice Onset Time (VOT). They defined VOT as “the time interval between the burst that marks release of the stop closure and the onset of quasi-periodicity that reflects laryngeal vibration” (1964, 422). Since English voiceless bilabial stop /p/ is not found in Saudi Arabic, Saudi speakers of English as a second language have two possible ways to pronounce it. First, they could not care about the distinction feature, then they could

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