Perception of European Portuguese Mid-Vowels by Ukrainian–Russian Bilinguals
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
The paper is very well written, extremely well documented (more than 60 references). The authors show that they master the domain and have read the most recent papers on the subject. Their paper reports on an experimental study (an identification task and a discrimination task): the perception of European Portuguese mid-vowels by Ukrainian-Russian bilinguals. The issue of bilingualism is particularly well-addressed, with considerations at the end on merged categories in bilinguals, and on the possibility of processing new vowel contrasts better when in a monolingual mode, than a bilingual mode (if the 2 L1s are phonologically close languages).
The method is meticulously detailed, the tasks are carefully designed, and the discussion is interesting and enlightening. I recommend publication for this paper, with a few minor corrections:
- It seems to me that there is a confusion throughout the paper between L2 and L3. The authors sometimes consider bilinguals to have 2 L1s (l. 177), sometimes they talk of L1 and L2 (l. 173). Therefore the 3rd language acquired is sometimes considered as L3 (l. 173), sometimes as L2 (l. 210). Do they consider balanced bilinguals as having 2 L1s and Ukrainian-dominant bilinguals as having L1 Ukrainian and L2 Russian? It would be nice to make this clear, because they mention models of L3 acquisition.
- The authors mention the fact that “no studies have examined Ukrainian monolinguals’ perception of Brazilian 413 Portuguese or European Portuguese” (ll. 413-414). It is a pity the authors have not taken a control group of Ukrainian monolingual speakers, so as to make comparisons. I suppose they couldn’t. Could they explain why?
- Ll. 181-187: this seems to be the authors’ hypothesis and should be made clearer.
- Tables 1, 2 and 3 clearly show that the /o/-/u/ contrast is problematic. There is no mention of that in 3.1. This is reported in 3.2 for the discrimination task, but it is already visible in the identification task.
- L. 246: add a comma after “Russian speakers”.
- L. 335: “the bilingual participants” are in fact the “balanced bilinguals”.
- L. 386: reaches
- L. 30 Mora et al.
- L. 149: Lloyd-Smith et al.
- L. 39 & 410: Smirnova Henriques is referenced as Henriques.
- L. 44: add “de” before “Macedo”.
- L. 439: Best & Tyler 2006 or 2007?
- L. 531: Flege and Eefting 1987a; Flege and Eefting 1987b;
- A few references are missing in the reference section:
o L. 93: Cruz-Ferreira
o L. 213: Jassem 2003; Wise 2000
o L. 308 Length 2024
o L. 514: Kogan 2024
o L. 517: Kogan & Mora 2022
o L. 552: Liu & Escudero 2023
o L. 585: Scaltritti et al 2017
o L. 594: Kogan & Reiterer 2021
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
This is an interesting paper that pursues an innovative research question: how proficient are Ukrainian/Russian bilinguals in perceiving the contrast between back and front mid vowels in European Portuguese, in light of the fact that a categorical distinction between mid vowels is absent from their respective L1 and L2? While the study design and the analysis of the results are carried out with high quality, I have a major concern with one key assumption the authors make in regards to the phonological systems of Russian and Ukrainian, and the interpretation of the results based on that assumption. The authors claim that Russian has one series of mid vowels consisting of /e/ and /o/, while Ukrainian has /ɛ/ and /ɔ/. The authors speculate that this may facilitate the perception of the /e/~/ɛ/ and /o/~/ɔ/ contrasts, as the bilingual participants should have access to all four mid vowels, distributed over Ukrainian and Russian. This assumption is, however, false. Both Russian and Ukrainian have one mid vowel series, and the choice of a symbol for transcribing the respective vowel phonemes is arbitrary: some sources choose /e/ and /o/, others use /ɛ/ and /ɔ/. Phonetically, these mid vowels have a range of realizations, mostly depending on the consonantal contexts: if surrounded by palatalized consonants, closed variants are pronounced, while in the vicinity of non-palatalized consonants, the vowels are more open. This explains why in Figure 6, F1 for the front mid vowel is so high: in гений /gʲenʲij/ `genius', the vowel is surrounded by two palatalized Cs. F1 for a word like цены /tsenɨ/ `prices' would be a lot lower. The authors could read up on this in Ordin (2011) and references therein. The situation in Ukrainian is similar, but palatalization is a bit less common overall than in Russian, which is why [ɛ] and [ɔ] could maybe be considered more salient.
My suggestion is as follows: The authors redact the representation of the Russian and Ukrainian vowel systems and the relevant parts of the discussion that rely on the false assumptions.
Ordin, Mikhail. 2011. Palatalization and Intrinsic Prosodic Vowel Features in Russian. Language and Speech 54(4), 547–568.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Review of Perception of European Portuguese mid-vowels by Ukrainian-Russian bilinguals
This study investigates the perception of mid-vowel contrasts in European Portuguese by Ukrainian-Russian bilingual speakers with no knowledge of Portuguese.
A novel aspect of the study is that it explores the perception of a contrast by speakers whose native languages do not have such contrast, but the sounds involved are attested in their two native languages, thus, making them potentially more aware of the phonetic nuances of these sounds. This could be an important contribution to the field of L3 perception, however, some more careful criticality is necessary when positing the initial hypotheses. I found the interpretation of the findings somewhat vague: “similar languages do not always guarantee enhanced perceptual abilities.” What do you mean by similar? What makes speakers aware of phonetic differences? Data visualisation in the article is effective.
I recommend the paper for publication in the special issue after the following recommendations are considered.
Does the low functional load of mid-vowels and potential neutralisation refer to Catalan or in general in line 27? The typological “explanation” (line 31) seems a bit circular as if saying that bigger vowel inventories are more difficult to learn than smaller vowel inventories. Please explain what you mean by a naïve listener; of any language including native speakers? I assume L2 learners also refers to those with no closed and open mid-vowels, unlike Italian, for instance.
Maybe it would be useful to mention briefly the differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese that are relevant for the present study. Also, you could give references to the “few studies” that address European Portuguese (line 37).
I find the schematic vowel trapezia little informative. For example, according to Figure 2 and Figure 3 the back mid vowels in Russian and Ukrainian are identical which makes the starting point of the study questionable since if the two o’s are phonetically identical – whatever their phonological analysis might be – participants cannot have access to a low and high mid-vowel. I suggest the authors present the averages of F1 and F2 formant values of previous studies. Please give examples that illustrate the contexts of diphthongisation described the last paragraph of 1.4 (lines 120-123).
Although with a very limited amount of data, but the production experiment carried out by the authors (presented in 2.3, Figure 6) also suggests that Russian and Ukrainian /o/ are phonetically identical. Furthermore, Portuguese /o/ and /u/ seem to overlap completely. I wonder how native speakers could distinguish between Portuguese speaker 1’s /o/ and speaker 2’s /u/. Can they? What other cues are used for this?
1.5 could be complemented by a description of the Russian dialect spoken in Ukraine, or at least the specific vowel features of Southern Russian.
I cannot see how the first paragraph in 1.6 (lines 137-144) is relevant for “bilingual perception”. Are the participants of the study Russian-Ukrainian bilinguals living in Portugal? (From 2.1 I understood they live in Ukraine. Please clarify this.) Or why is this paragraph relevant?
The design and realisation of the perception experiment as well as the analysis of data are sound, however, they exactly reflect the production data. My biggest concern is that based on the acoustic reality of Russian and Ukrainian back mid-vowels, there is no reason to hypothesise that speakers would be sensitive to the difference between Portuguese back low and high mid-vowels. Maybe it would be reasonable to limit the discussion to the front mid-vowels. Since no bilingual advantage is expected if the two phonetic categories don’t exist in the native languages of the speakers.
Please revise the Abstract following the modifications.
Comments on the Quality of English Language
I'm not a native speaker of English, but found the article easy to read and I didn't detect any language errors.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
The authors have substantially reworked their paper (in particular Sections 1 and 4) and have convincingly addressed the main concerns voiced in the first review. I believe the paper is now in principle ready for publication. I am adding two very minor comments.
1) l. 124, "Pompino-Marshall et al. 2016": the year should be 2017
2) l. 455 The authors could consider adding a subsection (4.1) for the bulk of text directly under "4 Discussion"
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you very much for acknowledging the improvements in our paper. We appreciate your close reading and the additional comments. Your suggested adjustments are not implemented.
Thank you again for your guidance throughout this process.
Best regards,
Authors
