Difficulty in discriminating non-native vowels: are Dutch vowels easier for australian English than Spanish listeners?

Some previous studies have shown that the availability of orthographic information leads to positive effects for second language (L2) phonology, while others document negative effects. In this paper, we examine the role of orthography on novel spoken-word learning by comparing word pairs that differed in most or all of their segments (nonminimal pairs) and those that only differed in one phoneme (minimal pairs) that was considered easy or difficult to discriminate. We tested the performance of learners whose native languages have transparent orthographies as well as learners with opaque orthographies. Our findings show that regardless of linguistic background and native orthographic system, availability of orthographic information during word learning did not have an effect on nonminimal pairs or perceptually easy minimal pairs. However, it had a positive effect on two minimal pairs that had the highest accuracy among the seven perceptually difficult ones, indicating that orthography only helped contrasts that were relatively easy to discriminate. The implications of these findings for L2 teaching and for future directions within L2 phonology are discussed.It is well known that most second language (L2) learners struggle to distinguish (in perception and production) nonnative phoneme contrasts that are not present in their native language. This reality has led to numerous empirical studies measuring the degree of difficulty with nonnative phoneme contrasts. Most studies have focused on English contrasts, as a large proportion of the world is faced with the task of learning to understand and speak English as a foreign or second

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Difficulty in discriminating non-native vowels: are Dutch vowels easier for australian English than Spanish listeners?

Cited by 2 publications

References 12 publications

The perception and production of Estonian vowels and vocalic quantity contrasts by Spanish L1 learners

The perception and production of Estonian vowels and vocalic quantity contrasts by Spanish L1 learners

Orthography plays a limited role when learning the phonological forms of new words: The case of Spanish and English learners of novel Dutch words

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