MARKEDNESS-BASED ACCOUNT OF PRODUCTION–PERCEPTION ASYMMETRIES IN UZBEK LEARNERS' ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH FRICATIVES

This article reports a production–perception study of English fricatives by Uzbek learners of English, with a focus on markedness and the extent to which perception predicts production. Forty upper-intermediate to advanced Uzbek EFL learners (mean age = 28) completed (i) a controlled reading task and (ii) a listening discrimination task targeting six English fricatives: /θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ/. Responses (N = 960 tokens per task) were coded for accuracy and checked by three trained raters with acoustic verification in Praat. Overall, perception accuracy (88.85%) significantly exceeded production accuracy (81.24%), supporting the perception-first account of L2 segmental acquisition (p < .05). Marked fricatives absent from Uzbek (/θ, ð/) and a low-frequency loanword phoneme (/ʒ/) showed disproportionate production difficulty, with /ð/ produced least accurately (62.50%). Substitution patterns reflected strong L1 transfer: /θ/→/s/ and /ð/→/θ, z/ were frequent, and /ʒ/ was often realized as /dʒ/. Perception–production correlations varied by segment; /θ/ showed a strong positive association (r = .532, p = .001), whereas most other fricatives showed weak or negligible correlations. The findings refine markedness-based predictions by showing that markedness can affect production more than perception, and they motivate integrated perception–production training for interdental and postalveolar fricatives in Uzbek EFL contexts.