Speech and language therapy (SLT) students’ production and perception of cardinal vowels: A longitudinal case study of six speech and language therapy students

This paper investigates six English-speaking speech and language therapy students producing and perceiving cardinal vowels around the time of their final practical phonetics examination and seven months after the examination. The study identified certain cardinal vowels as difficult in both production and perception.

The participants’ confidence ratings reflected their performance well overall, but they appeared to be overly confident about their ability to produce close and open vowels and under confident about their ability to perceive close-mid and open-mid vowels. The participants retained the relevant skills over the seven-month period, but one participant performed much worse in the second testing session, suggesting that there may be significant variation between individual students.