Cross-language perception of Brazilian Portuguese vowels by Californian English listeners

Abstract

The present study investigates the perceptual assimilation and auditory categorization of Brazilian Portuguese vowels by monolingual speakers of Californian English. In the perceptual assimilation task, listeners classified 140 vowel tokens in terms of 10 native English vowel categories by choosing from written English words containing the vowels. The stimuli were isolated vowels extracted from nonce words produced by 10 male and 10 female native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. In the auditory categorization task, the same listeners identified six Portuguese vowel contrasts which were presented in an XAB format, where X were a subset of the same natural vowel tokens from the previous task and A and B were synthesized prototypes of the Portuguese vowels. The results of the perceptual assimilation task demonstrate that Californian English listeners assimilate two out of six Portuguese vowel contrasts to more than two native vowel categories, resulting in many instances of multiple category assimilation (MCA). In the auditory categorization task, most of the contrasts with the lowest accuracy were those that showed MCA, which demonstrates that this pattern of assimilation may be the cause of Californian English listeners' perceptual difficulties with Portuguese vowels. Predictions for L2 acquisition are made.