On Availability of Conscious Knowledge in Discrimination of Vowel Length

Learners’ consciousness of mismatch of the phonemic inventory of their mother tongue with the language being learned may prompt them to activate their conscious grammar knowledge to monitor their oral production. This happens only when they become conscious of the nature of the task in advance. Otherwise the mismatch is believed to challenge their conscious knowledge of L2 significantly. It is assumed that at intermediate stages of second language learning, learners’ unconsciousness of the task requirement will depict inefficiency and/or unavailability of conscious knowledge in monitoring the quality feature, more precisely length of English vowels. In this study, this quality as one constituent feature of English vowels is investigated at conscious and unconscious states by involving Persian undergraduate learners of English. The duration of these vowels is contrasted in the word middle position. Results are indicative of the fact that learners succeed in maintaining the phonematic distinction accurately between the long and short vowels in different words by controlling the vowel length at conscious level, but they fail to demonstrate the same capability when the task load overwhelms or reduces their ability to preserve this distinction when they are unconscious of the task and are not able to activate their monitor.