Some Problems of American Students in Mastering Persian Phonology.

An adult learning to speak a foreign language normally retains an "accent" which may affect the intelligibility of certain sounds, but more often simply conveys the fact that the speaker is a non-native speaker. Various scholars have experimented and discussed the elements involved in a foreign accent. However, in Iran very few researchers have attempted to verify scientifically what are the phonetic and phonological aspects of an "accent." This author tried to determine whether or not a selected group of words, emphasizing stop voicing, produced by native speakers of Persian had significant phonetic and phonemic differences from those achieved by the American students. Subjects for the experiments were three groups of students, one Iranian, two American. A contrastive analysis of the Persian and the English stop consonants was made. An identical measurement test for all three groups was administered. Utilized was a Kay Sona-graph for acoustic analysis, and all spoken data from the Iranian group were compared with those of the American groups. An examination of acoustic correlates of Tehran stops produced by American students shows that the phonetically different but similar feature of /voice/ found in Tehran, Persian and English stops is intuitive to the Americans, and that the language learner cannot readily disassociate a phonological feature from habits of articulation. The results of this research support using the phonetic method for adult learners who want to improve their pronunciation ability. Further research and experimentation is necessary on the effect of the suprasegmental elements on a foreign accent and the most effective teaching materials and methods and to explore other possible techniques in the teaching process.