Abstract
This study investigates the relationship between non-native perception and production of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowels by eight European Spanish monolinguals. Participants’ accuracy on a non-native discrimination task was used to predict performance in non-native production. We also investigated the acoustic similarity between participants’ non-native and native vowel productions. The findings indicate a perception-production link: non-native vowels which were perceptually difficult to discriminate were also less stable and more varied when produced. These findings support the claim of the Second Language Linguistic Perception model (Escudero, 2005; van Leussen & Escudero, 2015) that learners initially perceive and produce the sounds of a second language according to the acoustic properties of the sounds produced in their native language.
Highlights
One of the ultimate goals for many second language (L2) learners is to be able to perceive the L2 in a nativelike manner and to produce speech without a discernible foreign accent
If there is a link between perception and production, where perception precedes production, we would predict that participants should be able to produce two separate vowel categories for the contrasts with higher discrimination accuracy
For the Brazilian Portuguese (BP) contrasts with overall lower accuracy, we would expect participants to produce each vowel in these categories with similar acoustic properties or, in other words, as one vowel category
Summary
One of the ultimate goals for many second language (L2) learners is to be able to perceive the L2 in a nativelike manner and to produce speech without a discernible foreign accent. Flege (1995) commented on the critical period hypothesis and further suggested that in order for language acquisition to be effective, it must occur before the establishment of the hemispheric specialisation of language functions. This claim is supported by Elliot (1995) who found evidence that listeners’ pronunciation accuracy was related to right hemispheric specialisation. Elliot (1995) proposes that different types of hemispheric specialisation may relate to pronunciation accuracy in different types of pronunciation tasks
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