DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2018.v06i03.041

Pages: 777-787

This paper presents findings of an acoustic phonetic analysis of eleven monophthongal phonetic vowels produced by bilingual speakers from Sri Lanka with Standard Sri Lankan English (SSLE) and Sinhala in their code repertoire. The instrument for English elicitations consists of 22 word tokens where each vowel is produced in /hVd/ and /bVt/ frames. The instrument for Sinhala elicitations marginally deviates and includes 10 disyllabic tokens due to language specific restrictions but the word initial clusters of /hV-/ and /bV-/ were retained. The methodology recorded vowel productions of 10 male and 10 female neurologically normal speakers and acoustic phonetic analyses of mean vowel formant frequencies were performed using the Bark psycho-acoustical scale. The findings were then compared with Mean Formant frequencies of monophthong vowels of Standard Southern British pronunciation of English (SSBE) recorded in literature. Cross-linguistic variation in the vowels in the vowel space across SSBE and SSLE was analyzed through plotted vowel quadrilaterals. This study also presents some new results, previously not noted in the literature on SSLE, particularly with respect to vowel space quadrilateral construction of its phonology.