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Abstract Abstract: Previous research has revealed some discrepancies in the production and perception of English /e/-/æ/ by native English speakers. However, how Chinese English learners handle vowel duration in their production and perception of the two sounds remains unknown. To answer this question, 70 Chinese college students and 14 native American English speakers in the current study finished an acoustic experiment and an identification experiment based on synthetic stimuli. The results revealed that in the production experiment, Chinese students did not use duration to distinguish the two vowels, and their duration differences could be interpreted as a function of articulatory process rather than a part of the phonology of the English language. By contrast, in the perception experiment, they relied more on duration information than spectral properties, suggesting they were insensitive to the spectral cues. Furthermore, their performance in the two experiments had little relation to their major, age of starting English learning or length of English education. Key words: production; perception; vowel duration
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