Perception of natural vowels by monolingual Canadian-English, Peninsular-Spanish, and Mexican-Spanish listeners.

Abstract

Based on a previously reported synthetic-vowel perception experiment, it was hypothesized that the location of the perceptual boundary between Spanish /i/ and /e/ differed for monolingual Peninsular-Spanish and Mexican-Spanish listeners (North-Central Spain and Mexico City), and this would affect the perception of the Canadian-English /i/—/ɪ/ contrast (Western Canada): Peninsular-Spanish listeners were predicted to identify almost all tokens of Canadian-English /i/ as Spanish /i/ and almost all tokens of Canadian-English /ɪ/ as Spanish /e/ (two-category assimilation), whereas Mexican-Spanish listeners were predicted to identify almost all tokens of Canadian-English /i/ as Spanish /i/, but identify some tokens of Canadian-English /ɪ/ as Spanish /i/ and some as Spanish /e/. Monolingual Peninsular-Spanish and Mexican-Spanish listeners’ perception of natural tokens of English /i/, /ɪ/, /e/, and /ε/ produced by monolingual Canadian-English speakers was tested. Both the Peninsular-Spanish and the Mexican-Spanish listeners had results consistent with the perceptual pattern predicted for the Peninsular-Spanish listeners. Implications for second-language speech perception are discussed.