Perceptual Assimilation and L2 Learning: Evidence from the Perception of Southern British English Vowels by Native Speakers of Greek and Japanese

Abstract

This study examined the extent to which previous experience with duration in first language (L1) vowel distinctions affects the use of duration when perceiving vowels in a second language (L2). Native speakers of Greek (where duration is not used to differentiate vowels) and Japanese (where vowels are distinguished by duration) first identified and rated the eleven English monophthongs, embedded in /bVb/ and /bVp/ contexts, in terms of their L1 categories and then carried out discrimination tests on those English vowels. The results demonstrated that both L2 groups were sensitive to durational cues when perceiving the English vowels. However, listeners were found to temporally assimilate L2 vowels to L1 category/categories. Temporal information was available in discrimination only when the listeners’ L1 duration category/categories did not interfere with the target duration categories and hence the use of duration in such cases cannot be attributed to its perceptual salience as has been proposed.