Abstract :
This study mainly investigated the predictions of the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) on Taiwanese vocational high school EFL learners’ acquisition of two English fricative consonants (/s/ and /?/) by examining the learners’ relative perceptual difficulty of the consonants. To achieve this purpose, two research questions were devised, and a self-designed listening identification test was carried out. A total of 43 students from a private vocational high school in northern Taiwan participated in this experiment. Their accuracy in perceiving the tested consonants was measured through the identification test. After all the participants’ test scores were gathered, an independent-samples t-test was used to analyze the data. The results of the study showed that the relative perceptual difficulty of the two fricatives for the students was /s/ = /?/. The finding suggested that Lado’s (1957) CAH could not accurately predict the participants’ acquisition of the consonants in perception.
Keyword :
Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH), perception, fricatives, consonants