More vowels are not always better : Australian English and Peruvian Spanish learners' comparable perception of Dutch vowels

Second-language (L2) learners frequently struggle with the perception of L2 sounds not present in their native language (Escudero; 2005, Escudero & Boersma, 2004; Fliege et al., 1997; Fox et al., 1995; Morrison, 2009). Vowels are especially difficult to master, presumably due to the continuous dimensions by which vowels can differ across languages (eg. Beddor & Strange, 1982; Polka & Bohn, 1996)

Acoustic distance explains speaker versus accent normalization in infancy

Acoustic/phonetic differences exist in cross-speaker and crossaccent speech. Young infants generally recognize speech across speakers but not across speakers of different accents. We examined how Australian English infants discriminated Dutch vowels produced by two speakers of the same accent, and by two speakers of two different accents. Acoustic analysis showed that the acoustic distance between samevowel tokens produced by speakers of different accents was larger than between those produced by speakers of the same accent. Infants demonstrated greater difference in looking time to an accent than a speaker change, indicating that they noticed a difference in a vowel produced in a different accent more than one produced by another speaker with the same accent. This supports the hypothesis that acoustic distance underlies the relative ease in handling speaker versus accent variation

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

Previous studies have shown that the number of vowels present in one’s L1 inventory may affect the ability to learn and discriminate non-native vowel contrasts. Specifically, learners whose L1 contains fewer vowels compared to the target language may find many non-native vowel contrasts novel and have discrimination performance lower than learners whose L1 contains more vowels than the target language for whom most of the non-native vowel contrasts will be familiar. The present study tested monolingual Australian English (AusE) listeners’ discrimination of non-native vowels in Dutch, which has fewer vowels compared to AusE. We further compared AusE listeners’ performance to that of native monolingual Spanish listeners whose L1 contains fewer vowels than Dutch. AusE listeners were able to discriminate all Dutch vowel contrasts above chance. While there was no main effect of language background, an interaction language background x contrast revealed that AusE listeners more accurately discriminated the /I-Y/ contrast compared to Spanish listeners, suggesting some advantage for AusE listeners. The findings are discussed in relation to models of non-native and L2 speech perception together with a comparison of vowel acoustic properties across AusE, Spanish and Dutch

Is more always better? : the perception of Dutch vowels by English versus Spanish listeners

The present study investigates Australian English (AusE) monolingual listeners’ perception of non-native vowels in Dutch, a language with fewer vowels compared to AusE. AusE listeners’ performance was compared to native monolingual Peruvian Spanish (PS) listeners whose L1 contains fewer vowels than Dutch. Results show that compared to PS listeners, AusE listeners were better at discriminating only one contrast, /ɪ -ʏ /. AusE listeners took full advantage of their vowel inventory size by mapping Dutch vowels across multiple English categories. Surprisingly, they also appear to duplicate the PS single category assimilation by mapping Dutch /ɪ / and /i/ to both English /i/ and /ɪ /