Study Of Phonological Representations Of English Words In EFL Learners

As one of the components of lexical form, sound plays an important role in oralcommunication. The accuracy of sound is of vital importance in promoting theefficiency of oral communication. The accuracy of the production of lexical sound isfurther influenced by the phonological information stored in the long-term memory,that is, the phonological representation. Phonological representation constitutes aleading part in an individual’s speech and literacy development, as well as adetermining factor of one’s linguistic ability. The quality of phonologicalrepresentations relates to how readily individuals retrieve the underlying soundinformation, how accurately and fluently they can speak, and how well they canperceive the subtle differences in others’ speech.This study explores the underlying phonological representations of the Englishwords in EFL learners’ minds by employing an experimental method. The experiment,which includes a series of tasks of wordlist reading, word and phoneme identification,pronunciation familiarity judgment, and a follow-up interview, was conducted amongtwenty Chinese sophomore university students. They have learned English for at leastseven years and did not have the experience of learning abroad. Through manualscoring and Praat analysis, pronunciation deviations of the wordlist reading task arefirst identified and grouped into different categories, then results of other four tasksare presented, analyzed, and finally discussed together with that of the wordlistreading task.The major findings of this study could be summarized as follows. First of all,there exist sound images of basic English words in learners’ minds, but these soundimages are fuzzy and not accurate. Secondly, the extant sound images of Englishwords in learners’ minds are fragmented, instead of intact. Thirdly, orthography existsprior to sound form in EFL learners.The results of this study demonstrate that orthography plays primary role inlearning the pronunciation of English words for EFL learners.