Acoustic Properties of Amis Vowels and the Implications on English Pronunciation Teaching

• Main Authors: Wei-Chen Lin, 林威誠
• Other Authors: Raung-Fu Chung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 101
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/62490659573209061993

碩士 === 南台科技大學 === 應用英語系 === 100 === The essential aim of this study is to investigate the Amis vowel qualities on the basis of acoustic properties. Furthermore, I also attempt to explore the production of English vowels for Amis students. The population of Amis is the top one among Formosan languages in Taiwan. There have been no reports on the Amis sounds reflected in acoustic properties. Hopefully, this study could help see the acoustic nature of Amis vowels more clearly. The data collected were taken from Yuli, Hualien. Sixteen informants, different ages and genders, were recruited in this study. Eight of informants were Amis elders, six were Amis students and two were English native speakers. Speech analyzing program Praat was employed for acoustic analysis in this study. Besides, Contrastive Analysis (Lado, 1959) was adopted to present what differences in vowel qualities between Amis and English. Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1995) was adopted to interpret the production of English vowels for Amis students. To sum up, this study may be of importance in explaining acoustic properties of Amis vowels, as well as in providing English teachers with a better understanding of how teach students to pronounce English well.