Perception of cross-language vowel differences: A longitudinal study of native Spanish learners of English

Abstract

The study evaluated the ability of native Spanish speakers to perceive phonetic differences between Spanish vowels (/i e a o u/) and English vowels (/ieIɑoʊu/). Eighteen adult native speakers of Spanish who were learning English as a second language (L2) in Birmingham. AL were tested at 6-month intervals over a 3.5-year period (T1–T7). Five tokens of each Spanish and English vowel were randomly presented for classification in terms of one of the five vowels of Spanish, and were rated for goodness of fit on a 6-point scale (where 0 indicated ‘‘not Spanish’’ and 5 indicated a ‘‘good example’’ of a Spanish vowel). At both T1 and T7, English /i/, /eI/, /ɑ/, /oʊ/ and /u/ were usually classified as Spanish /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/ and /u/, respectively. A group analysis revealed that significantly higher ratings were given to the Spanish than English member of the /o/-/oʊ/, /u/-/u/, /e/-/eI/ and /a/-/ɑ/ pairs but not the /i/-/i/ pair. However, the number of individual L2 learners who gave significantly higher ratings to a Spanish vowel than to the corresponding English vowel differed substantially (/o/-/oʊ/ n=18, /u/-/u/ n=8, /e/-/eI/ n=5, /a/−/ɑ/ n=1, /i/-/i/n=1). Possible explanations for these between-pair differences —acoustic and perceptual—will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH.]