Brazilian Portuguese vowel discrimination by Nungon and Tashelhit speakers

Abstract

The vowel system of speakers’ native languages are known to affect perception of vowels in foreign languages (Elvin et al., 2021). In a field-based behavioral experiment, we tested the perception of Brazilian Portuguese vowels (seven-vowel system) by speakers of the Papuan language Nungon (six-vowel system) and the Berber language Tashelhit (three-vowel system). 60 native speakers of Nungon and 38 native speakers of Tashelhit participated. The acoustics of Nungon vowels were previously analyzed using a 30-point analysis technique (Sarvasy et al., 2020). For the present study, we also analyzed Tashelhit vowels using the same technique. We then used discriminant analysis to analyze the relationship between speakers’ performance on the Brazilian Portuguese vowel discrimination task and the acoustics of vowels in their native languages. We present preliminary results of these analyses, and address their possible contributions to four areas: (a) description of the acoustics of under-described languages, (b) the relationship between native vowel systems and perception of foreign vowels, (c) methods for undertaking rigorous acoustic and experimental research in noisy, field environments, and (d) theoretical frameworks for phonetic learning such as the L2LP model (Escudero, 2005; van Leussen and Escudero, 2015).