Abstract.A series of experiments shows that Spanish learners of English acquire the shipsheep contrast in a way specific to their target dialect (Scottish or Southern British), and that many learners exhibit a perceptual strategy found in neither Spanish nor English. To account for these facts as well as for the findings of earlier research on L2 speech perception, we provide an Optimality-Theoretic model of phonological categorization that comes with a formal learning algorithm for its acquisition. Within this model, the dialect-dependent and L2-specific facts provide evidence for the hypotheses of Full Transfer and Full Access.

The lexical and phonetic mapping of auditorily confusable L2 nonwords was examined by teaching L2 learners novel words and by later examining their word recognition using an eye-tracking paradigm. During word learning, two groups of highly proficient Dutch learners of English learned 20 English nonwords, of which 10 contained the English contrast /e/-ae/ (a confusable contrast for native Dutch speakers). One group of subjects learned the words by matching their auditory forms to pictured meanings, while a second group additionally saw the spelled forms of the words. We found that the group who received only auditory forms confused words containing /ae/ and /e/ symmetrically, i.e., both /ae/ and /e/ auditory tokens triggered looks to pictures containing both /ae/ and /e/. In contrast, the group who also had access to spelled forms showed the same asymmetric word recognition pattern found by previous studies, i.e., they only looked at pictures of words containing /e/ when presented with /e/ target tokens, but looked at pictures of words containing both /ae/ and /e/ when presented with /ae/ target tokens. The results demonstrate that L2 learners can form lexical contrasts for auditorily confusable novel L2 words. However, and most importantly, this study suggests that explicit information over the contrastive nature of two new sounds may be needed to build separate lexical representations for similar-sounding L2 words. r

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This paper examines four acoustic correlates of vowel identity in Brazilian and EuropeanPortuguese: first formant (F1), second formant (F2), duration, and fundamental frequency (F0).Both varieties of Portuguese display some cross-linguistically common phenomena: vowelintrinsic duration, vowel-intrinsic pitch, gender-dependent size of the vowel space, genderdependent duration, and a skewed symmetry in F1 between front and back vowels. Also, the average difference between the vocal tract sizes associated with /i/ and /u/, as measured from formant analyses, is comparable to the average difference between male and female vocal tract sizes. A language-specific phenomenon is that in both varieties of Portuguese the vowel-intrinsic duration effect is larger than in many other languages. Differences between Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) are found in duration (BP has longer stressed vowels than EP), in F1 (the lower mid front vowel approaches its higher mid counterpart more closely in EP than in BP), and in the size of the intrinsic pitch effect (larger for BP than for EP).

Previous studies have shown that orthography is activated during speech processing and that it may have positive and negative effects for non-native listeners. The present study examines whether the effect of orthography on non-native word learning depends on the relationship between the grapheme–phoneme correspondences across the native and non-native orthographic systems. Specifically, congruence between grapheme–phoneme correspondences across the listeners’ languages is predicted to aid word recognition, while incongruence is predicted to hinder it. Native Spanish listeners who were Dutch learners or naïve listeners (with no exposure to Dutch) were taught Dutch pseudowords and their visual referents. They were trained with only auditory forms or with auditory and orthographic forms. During testing, non-native listeners were less accurate when the target and distractor pseudowords formed a minimal pair (differing in only one vowel) than when they formed a non-minimal pair, and performed better on perceptually easy than on perceptually difficult minimal pairs. For perceptually difficult minimal pairs, Dutch learners performed better than naïve listeners and Dutch proficiency predicted learners’ word recognition accuracy. Most importantly and as predicted, exposure to orthographic forms during training aided performance on minimal pairs with congruent orthography, while it hindered performance on minimal pairs with incongruent orthography.