To measure the students’ ability in producing language sounds teachers relied on the performance of the students without paying attention to the cognitive process happened. Lately, many writings stated that the ability in recognizing sounds was a part of sound production. Without being able to recognize the sounds produced by the native speakers, the students will not be able to imitating the decent features of the language sounds. This research tried to interpret the ability of the students in producing sounds in Indonesian, not only in production but also in recognition. By employing the sounds placed in a sound environment with the syllable constrain, the research tried to see the limit of students’ ability in mastering unacceptable sound sequences. The waveform and the spectrogram showed in the speech analyzer machine expounded the ability of the students to produce a certain phonetic sound, while the result of dictation test disclose how the students recognized the sounds produced by native speakers. The result showed that poor ability in sound recognition impinged upon the ability in producing language sounds.

Keywords: cognitive science, speech recognition, SLA, sound production, BIPA