English vowel perception by native speakers of European Portuguese and Mandarin.

Abstract

This study investigated the perception of eight American English stressed syllabic monophthongs (/i, I, E, æ, V, O, U, u/) by two groups of nonnative listeners: Portuguese and Chinese. Each group was formed by 15 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners, with an upper‐intermediate level of English proficiency, all undergraduate students at a Portuguese university. An identification test was designed to investigate how the participants would perceive the English vowels, which are not present in their first language (L1) inventory as stressed monophthongs (/I, æ, V, U/ in the case of the Portuguese speakers, and all vowels but /i, u/ in the case of the Mandarin speakers). The large number of target vowels played as stimuli allowed a cross‐language analysis of vowel distribution in the acoustic space: for the two groups of EFL listeners, it was more difficult to perceive the English vowels located in a high density area of the English vowel space than those in less crowded areas. For the two groups of speakers, the vowels /æ/ and /U/ had the greatest misidentification rates.