Second language perception of English vowels by Portuguese learners: The effect of stimulus type

The present study investigated L2 English vowel perception and the effect of stimulus type on the identification of vowel segments that present difficulties for Portuguese learners. It also examined the effect of subject factors such as age of acquisition, length of formal instruction, language use and vocabulary size, on the L2 learners’ perceptual performance. Twenty-nine adult Portuguese learners of English were tested on six English vowels (/iː ɪ ɛ æ ɜː ʌ/) with two tasks, differing in stimulus type, i.e., in the lexical status of trials (real words and pseudo words) in which the target vowels were auditorily presented. The testing stimuli consisted of 72 trials with real CVC words and 72 trials with pseudo CVC words, naturally produced by two speakers of standard southern British English (SSBE). The L2 vocabulary size of the participants was measured with two receptive vocabulary size tests and the language background data, viz. age of learning, length of formal instruction and L2 use was collected with a questionnaire. Results confirmed the Portuguese learners’ difficulties in accurately categorizing the target vowels, particularly when identifying the vowel target sounds embedded in pseudo words, which suggests that L2 phonological categories may be established after lexical forms. Furthermore, a significant correlation was found between L2 language use and accurate perception of four of the target vowels, which indicates that the more frequently learners use the target language, the more accurate is their L2 English vowel perception.