Relations between native Spanish speakers’ perception and production of English vowels

Abstract

This study is about the relation between native Spanish speakers’ perception and production of English vowels and their age of arrival (AoA) in the U.S. The participants were also grouped by dialect, Central American/Caribbean or South American Spanish. In a listening task, the participants identified the words in the set ‘‘heed, hid, head, had, hod, hawed, hood, who’d, hud, heard’’ and then produced four repetitions of each of the ten words for spectral and temporal analysis. Finally, they indicated their sensitivity to contrasts between the vowels of the English vowel pairs /i–I/, /I–ε/, and /æ-≳/, rating them from ‘‘very similar’’ to ‘‘very dissimilar.’’ The results of our acoustic analyses will be compared with the participants’ identification data to determine how the vowel space of L1 (primary language) affect the production and perception of L2, and also with the listeners’ sensitivity to the vowel–contrast pairs.