Early and late Spanish-English bilingual adults' identification of American English vowels
Miriam Baigorri, Erika S. Levy · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2017
Increasing numbers of Hispanic immigrants are entering the US (US Census Bureau, 2011) and are learning American English (AE) as a second language (L2). Accurate perception of AE vowels is important because vowels carry a large part of the speech signal (Kewley-Port, Burkle, & Lee, 2007). The present study examined the accuracy with which early and late Spanish-English bilingual adults identify AE vowels. Listeners were presented with AE vowels (/i/, / I /, /ɛ/, /ʌ/, /æ /, /ɑ/, and /o/) in a /gəbVpə/ context. They were instructed to click on the key word response from a choice of nonsense words that contained the second vowel they heard. Findings indicate that identification accuracy of L2 vowels was significantly higher with early age of L2 acquisition. However, early bilingual listeners’ vowel perception was not native-like, suggesting that the phonetic properties of their native language influenced L2 speech perception. Additionally, identification accuracy varied as a function of the particular vowel, shedding light on how the relationship between Spanish and AE vowel inventories might explain the difficulties that arise in Spanish-English bilinguals’ identification of AE vowels. Findings are examined in relation to perceptual assimilation and discrimination of the stimuli by the same listeners.