Abstract

RATO, Anabela; RAUBER, Andréia Schurt; SOARES, Letícia Piske  and  LUCAS, Liane Regio. Challenges in the perception and production of english front vowels by native speakers of european portuguese. Diacrítica [online]. 2014, vol.28, n.1, pp.142-159. ISSN 0807-8967.

This paper presents the results of a study that investigated the perception and production of the English front vowels (/i/, //, //, /æ/) by a group of 18 native speakers of European Portuguese. Perception of the target vowels was tested with an identification test, while production data were analyzed acoustically. The results show that the Portuguese listeners tended to discriminate the two target vowels of the /i/-// pair accurately, but produced them with some overlap. As regards the low vowels, /æ/ was produced slightly higher and further back than //, with considerable overlap, and the results of the perception test for this pair indicated that /æ/ was mostly identified as //. Considering that English // is lower than Portuguese // (Escudero et al., 2009), both English // and /æ/ were perceived as low enough to be identified as /æ/. The results also suggest that perception precedes production of the high vowels, since the high accurate scores in the perception of /i/ and // did not mean that the two categories were produced with enough euclidean distance in the acoustic space. As for the low vowels, the participants tended to perceive both vowels as low enough to be considered /æ/, but produced both high enough to be considered //.

Keywords : non-native phonological learning; English vowels; perception; production.

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