Production of Persian Low Vowels by Japanese Learners of Persian

Persian has two low vowels, namely, the front vowel /a/ and the back vowel /ɒ/, while Japanese has only one low vowel which is phonologically a back vowel, but phonetically a central one. In the present study, the research question is whether Japanese learners of Persian language are able to produce the Persian front and back low vowels distinctively or not. In order to answer this question, Japanese learners of Persian language were asked to produce Persian and Japanese low vowels in the target words. Native speakers of Persian also produced the same Persian words. Then, the frequency of the first and the second formants (F1 and F2) of low vowels were measured.Thefrequency of the first and the second formants of Persian low vowels in the Japanese learners' production were compared to that of the Persian native speakers. The statistical analyses revealed that Japanese learners produce the two Persian low vowels without a significant difference and almost similar to the Japanese low vowel.