Abstract
The present study investigated L2 English vowel perception and the effect of stimulus type on the identification of vowel segments that present difficulties for Portuguese learners. It also examined the effect of subject factors such as age of acquisition, length of formal instruction, language use and vocabulary size, on the L2 learners’ perceptual performance. Twenty-nine adult Portuguese learners of English were tested on six English vowels (/iː ɪ ɛ æ ɜː ʌ/) with two tasks, differing in stimulus type, i.e., in the lexical status of trials (real words and pseudo words) in which the target vowels were auditorily presented. The testing stimuli consisted of 72 trials with real CVC words and 72 trials with pseudo CVC words, naturally produced by two speakers of standard southern British English (SSBE). The L2 vocabulary size of the participants was measured with two receptive vocabulary size tests and the language background data, viz. age of learning, length of formal instruction and L2 use was collected with a questionnaire. Results confirmed the Portuguese learners’ difficulties in accurately categorizing the target vowels, particularly when identifying the vowel target sounds embedded in pseudo words, which suggests that L2 phonological categories may be established after lexical forms. Furthermore, a significant correlation was found between L2 language use and accurate perception of four of the target vowels, which indicates that the more frequently learners use the target language, the more accurate is their L2 English vowel perception.
Highlights
Research has shown that difficulties in the acquisition of non-native vowels may hinder the successful mastering of second language (L2) phonology by adult learners (Strange, 2007)
The findings suggested that the English phonological categories /ɪ/, /æ/ and /ʊ/ tend to be assimilated to the Portuguese vowel sounds /i/, /ɛ/ and /u/, respectively, and no distinction between the two vowels of each pair was made due to their acoustic and articulatory proximity and high degree of perceived cross-linguistic (L1-L2) phonetic similarity, leading to the merging of two distinct L2 English vowel categories into one L1 category
No previous findings have been reported for the vowel pair /ɜ/-/ʌ/, more difficulty would be expected for the lax counterpart, which has a shorter duration
Summary
Research has shown that difficulties in the acquisition of non-native vowels may hinder the successful mastering of second language (L2) phonology by adult learners (Strange, 2007). Several studies on L2 English vowel acquisition by L1 speakers of different Romance languages with small vowel inventories such as Spanish (Aliaga-Garcia, 2010, 2017; Carlet & Cebrian, 2015; Carlet, 2017; Cebrian, 2006; Cebrian, Mora & Aliaga-Garcia, 2010; Flege, Bohn, & Jang, 1997), Italian (Flege, MacKay, & Meador, 1999; Flege & MacKay, 2004) and Portuguese (Nobre-Oliveira, 2007; Rato, 2018; Rato, & Rauber, 2015; Rato, 2014; Rato, Rauber, Soares, & Lucas, 2014, Rauber, 2010; Rauber, Escudero, Bion & Baptista, 2005) have revealed that the perception of the larger inventory of English L2 vowels is difficult due to an L2-to-L1 mapping issue (Bohn, 2017), that is, to how learners perceptually map the vowel sounds of the target language onto the vowel categories of the native language. The English vowels /ɪ/, /æ/, and /ʊ/ tend to be assimilated to Portuguese /i/, /ɛ/, and /u/ and no distinction between the two vowels of each pair is made due to their high degree of perceived cross-linguistic phonetic similarity (Rato & Rauber, 2015; Rato, 2014; Rato et al, 2014; Rauber, 2010)
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