The oxygen and nitrogen abundances in the HII regions of the nine Virgo
spirals of the sample from Skillman et al (1996) and in nine field spiral
galaxies are re-determined with the recently suggested P - method. We confirm
that there is an abundance segregation in the sample of Virgo spirals in the
sense that the HI deficient Virgo spirals near the core of the cluster have
higher oxygen abundances in comparison to the spirals at the periphery of the
Virgo cluster. At the same time both the Virgo periphery and core spirals have
counterparts among field spirals. We conclude that if there is a difference in
the abundance properties of the Virgo and field spirals, this difference
appears to be small and masked by the observational errors.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy and
Astrophysic