The peculiarities of perceiving English sounds by the native speakers of the Thai language

The differences between the phonetic systems of the English and the Thai languages result in interference processes arising both at the level of producing and at that of perceiving English speech by Thai language native speakers. These processes may distort the meaning of an utterance and hamper communication. To verify the assumption, an experiment was made which corroborated the presence of segmental phonetic interference at the level of English speech perception by Thais.