Vowel inventory size matters: assessing cue-weighting in L2 vowel perception

Abstract

To examine whether L1 vowel inventory size could be a contributing factor to the use of temporal cues in L2 vowel perception, this study assessed the perception of English /i-ɪ/ by 66 learners of four different L1s: Danish, Portuguese, Catalan and Russian. The L2 learners performed a forced-choice identification task containing natural and duration-manipulated stimuli. Findings suggest that the participants’ over-reliance on duration cues seem to be partially related to their L1 vowel inventory size. The participants with the greatest L1 vowel inventory (Danish) demonstrated the most native-like vowel perception and the participants with the smallest L1 vowel inventory (Russian) over-relied on duration cues more than the other learners. Interestingly, the participants with somewhat comparable L1 vowel inventories (Portuguese and Catalan) performed similarly.

When the Easy Becomes Difficult: Factors Affecting the Acquisition of the English /iː/-/ɪ/ Contrast

“…In fact, L2 English learners have been found to exploit temporal cues in their categorization of the English /iː/-/ɪ/ contrast to a greater extent than native English speakers, who appear to rely mostly on spectral cues (Hillenbrand et al, 2000;Escudero and Boersma, 2004;Cebrian, 2006). This is found with learners whose L1 has temporal contrasts (e.g., /iː/-/i/ contrast), such as Japanese and Finnish (Ylinen et al, 2009;Grenon et al, 2019), and importantly also with speakers whose L1 has no vowel duration contrast, such as Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Russian, Catalan, Portuguese and Spanish (Bohn, 1995;Flege et al, 1997;Wang and Munro, 1999;Escudero and Boersma, 2004;Cebrian, 2006;Mora and Fullana, 2007;Kondaurova and Francis, 2008;Morrison, 2008;Aliaga-García, 2011;Kivistö de Souza et al, 2017). These results lend support to Bohn's (1995) desensitization hypothesis, which claims that L2 learners may not be sensitive to L2 spectral distinctions that are not exploited in their L1, to which they have become desensitized.…”

The roles of task, segment type, and attention in L2 perceptual training

“…Specifically, the tense vowel was more successfully identified when preceding a voiced consonant than a voiceless consonant, and the opposite held true for the lax vowel /ɪ/. This over-reliance on temporal cues was also found in previous L2 perceptual studies (Aliaga-Garcia & Mora, 2009; Cebrian, 2006; Kivistö-de Souza & Carlet, 2014). Thus, the findings in Cebrian and Carlet (2014) add to the existing HVPT literature by providing empirical evidence that the learnability of different target sounds may not be affected homogeneously and underscore the role of context-dependent variability in L2 perception.…”