The Effect of L2 Experience on the Identification of British English Monophthongs by L2 Thai Learners Patchanok Kitikanan English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Naresuan University, Phitsanulok, Thailand Abstract—This paper investigates the ability of L2 Thai learners to identify eleven British English monophthongs /iː, ɪ, e, æ, ɒ, ɑː, ɔː, ʊ, uː, ʌ, ɜː/. Among these vowels, /æ/, /iː/, /uː/, /e/ and /ɔː/ are vowels that occur in both Thai and English phonological inventories (shared sounds) whereas the other six vowels occur only in English (non-shared sounds). The subjects were split into two groups of L2 Thai learners: high- experienced and low-experienced. The degree to which L2 experience influenced subjects’ ability to identify British English monophthongs was measured by their ability to match spoken L2 vowels to their written counterparts. The hypotheses of this study were generated from the results of the perceptual assimilation task in the study of Kitikanan (2020). The results showed that the low-experienced group performed poorly, with low identification scores, across all vowels. However, the high-experienced group obtained high scores identifying British English /e/, / ɔː/, /ɪ/ and /ɜː/. The scores of correct identifications for these four Brit ish English vowels of the high-experienced group were significantly higher than that of the low-experienced group, suggesting the positive effect of the L2 experience. For other vowels, the scores of both groups were not significantly different from one another. The predictions of the perceptual assimilation task failed to predict most results. These results might imply the need for other means to compare L1 and L2 sounds to understand the mechanism regarding the identification ability of the L2 sounds. They may also suggest that some vowels are easier to learn than others. Index Terms—sound identification, British English, monophthongs, Thai, L2 experience I. INTRODUCTION In L2 phonology, the investigation into L2 sound identification has been widely studied (e.g., Bohn and Flege, 1990; Ryu, 2018; Lee and Cho, 2018). To generate predictions for this, many methods can be employed, such as using the articulatory aspects, the acoustic characteristics, and the perceived similarity between L1 and L2 sound categories. Among these methods, the exploration of the perceived similarity between the sounds in the L1 and L2 groups seems to be accepted as one of the best methods as shown by Best’s Perceptual Assimilation Model -L2 (PAM-L2) (Best and Tyler, 2007). According to PAM-L2, the ability to discriminate L2 sound contrast depends on the degree of perceived similarity of the two sounds. Many research studies have been carried out into the exploration of the sound identification of the L2 sounds based on the perceived similarity experiment (e.g., Horslunda et al., 2015; Wang and Chen, 2019; Lee and Cho, 2020). For example, Horslunda et al. (2015) studied the relationship between the identification of L2 consonants and the perceptual assimilation of L2 consonants compared to L1 sound categories. L2 Danish listeners identified 20 English consonants in the initial position in terms of Danish categories and rated how well these matched. Then the predictions were tested for the identification task in which the same listeners identified the same 20 English consonants using English categories. The results showed that the perceived similarity between L1 and L2 sounds predicted the results of the sound identification task successfully. Many studies also point out that the perception of the L2 sounds is not only based on the perceived similarity, but many factors, such as length of residence (LOR), age of arrival (AOA), motivation and sex of speakers also play a role in the perception. Among these factors, L2 experience often showed to have an impact on the L2 sound perception (e.g., Bohn and Flege, 1990; Bohn and Ellegaard, 2019). For example, in the study of Bohn and Flege (1990), adult native German speakers participated in an identification task of the English vowels /i, ɪ, ɛ, æ/. The results showed that the experienced Germans were able to identify the new vowel /æ/ more like native English speakers than inexperienced Germans. Another example is from the study of Bohn and Ellegaard (2019), where two groups of Danish listeners differing in L2 English language experience participated in the perceptual assimilation, sound discrimination and sound identification tasks for English fricatives. The effect of language experience was evident in all three tasks as most results showed that experienced listeners exhibited assimilations and graded discriminations with higher sensitivity towards English fricatives than the inexperienced listeners. The higher sensitivity reflected in more accurate identifications. With regard to the monophthongs in Thai and British English, there are twelve vowels: /iː, ɪ, e, æ, ɒ, ɑː, ɔː, ʊ, uː, ʌ, ɜː, ə/ in British English whereas in Thai, there are eighteen: /i, iː, e, eː, æ, æː, ɔ, ɔː, a, aː, u, uː, ə, əː, o, oː, ɯ, ɯː/. The ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 676-683, April 2022 DOI: https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1204.07 © 2022 ACADEMY PUBLICATION