The Role of Acoustic Similarity and Non-Native Categorisation in Predicting Non-Native Discrimination: Brazilian Portuguese Vowels by English vs. Spanish Listeners

Jaydene Elvin,Daniel Williams,Jason A Shaw,Catherine T Best,Paola Escudero

doi:10.3390/languages6010044

Abstract

This study tests whether Australian English (AusE) and European Spanish (ES) listeners differ in their categorisation and discrimination of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowels. In particular, we investigate two theoretically relevant measures of vowel category overlap (acoustic vs. perceptual categorisation) as predictors of non-native discrimination difficulty. We also investigate whether the individual listener’s own native vowel productions predict non-native vowel perception better than group averages. The results showed comparable performance for AusE and ES participants in their perception of the BP vowels. In particular, discrimination patterns were largely dependent on contrast-specific learning scenarios, which were similar across AusE and ES. We also found that acoustic similarity between individuals’ own native productions and the BP stimuli were largely consistent with the participants’ patterns of non-native categorisation. Furthermore, the results indicated that both acoustic and perceptual overlap successfully predict discrimination performance. However, accuracy in discrimination was better explained by perceptual similarity for ES listeners and by acoustic similarity for AusE listeners. Interestingly, we also found that for ES listeners, the group averages explained discrimination accuracy better than predictions based on individual production data, but that the AusE group showed no difference.

Highlights

It is well known that learning to perceive and produce the sounds of a new language can be a difficult task for many second language (L2) learners
This finding was predicted by acoustic similarity, instead of there being a larger percentage of categorisation to Australian English (AusE)
Based on the above findings, it appears that the non-native categorisation patterns for European Spanish (ES) listeners were largely in line with predictions based on acoustic similarity between the target Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowels and the listeners’ production of their native vowel categories reported in the cross-language acoustic comparisons

Summary

Introduction

It is well known that learning to perceive and produce the sounds of a new language can be a difficult task for many second language (L2) learners. The Second Language Linguistic Perception model (L2LP; Escudero 2005, 2009; van Leussen and Escudero 2015; Elvin and Escudero 2019; Yazawa et al 2020) claim that both the phonological and articulatory-phonetic (PAM, PAM-L2), or acoustic-phonetic similarity (SLM, L2LP) between the native and target language are predictive of L2 discrimination patterns This suggests that discrimination difficulties are not uniform across groups of L2 learners, at least at the initial stage of learning, as a result of their differing native (L1) phonemic inventories. According to the L2LP framework, the NEW learning scenario is predicted to be difficult because in order for listeners to acquire both sounds (the learning task), a learner must either create a new L2 category or split an existing L1 category (van Leussen and Escudero 2015; Elvin and Escudero 2019)

Methods

Results

Conclusion