Search Results (7)

Perceptual overlap has been attested as significantly contributing to difficulties in L2 speech perception. The current study aims at investigating whether this effect is also observable in the context of L3, specifically in the perception of European Portuguese oral vowels by Hungarian listeners. We crossed the results of two experiments—a categorization task and a discrimination task—and found that perceptual overlap is also a significant factor in L3 perception. Furthermore, we compared different measures of perceptual overlap as predictors for discrimination abilities of L3 vowel contrasts. Namely, we compared perceptual overlap scores calculated on group means and scores based on individual results. None of the measures was conclusively more reliable than another in predicting differences in discrimination difficulties. However, accuracy in perception of EP contrasts or vowels absent from the Hungarian vocalic system was significantly lower than for the other vowels, suggesting that non-nativeness can cause difficulties in L3 perception. Additionally, participants who also reported knowledge of German performed more accurately in discrimination of contrasts that included the vowel [ɐ], a vowel absent from their L1 but present in the German vocalic system, indicating a positive effect of knowledge of languages previously acquired on L3 perception. Full article

Mid-vowel contrasts often present perceptual challenges for speakers of languages that lack these distinctions. However, bilingual speakers, who have access to two phonological systems and exhibit greater metalinguistic awareness, might not necessarily encounter such difficulties. In this study, 27 Ukrainian–Russian bilinguals listened to an unfamiliar language, European Portuguese, and completed two tasks: an identification task where they assimilated the seven stressed oral Portuguese vowels to the closest Ukrainian categories and a discrimination task featuring the Portuguese vowel contrasts /ɛ/–/e/, /e/–/i/, /ɔ/–/o/, and /o/–/u/. No bilingual advantage was observed: the discrimination performance on all contrasts was slightly above or near a chance level (A-prime scores varied between 0.55 and 0.20). These perceptual difficulties may be attributed to the acoustic similarities between the vowels within the contrasts rather than to the differences between the phonological inventories of the languages (the most challenging contrast was not a mid-vowel contrast but acoustically similar /o/–/u/). Although with the back mid-vowel contrast, the difficulty seems to also stem from the possibility that both Ukrainian and Russian have only one back mid-vowel, /o/, and this category occupies a wider area in the vowel space of Ukrainian–Russian bilinguals. The results suggest that bilingual advantage does not always manifest itself in the perception of a new language, especially if two typologically close languages are involved. Full article

It is widely accepted that languages organize speech material into prosodic domains, which are hierarchically arranged. However, it is still a matter of debate whether this prosodic hierarchy is composed of a small number of universal categories, or whether these prosodic categories are language-particular and emergent. In this article, we concentrate on one of these categories, the foot, and we investigate its role in European Portuguese (EP). Whereas research on EP has shown that other prosodic domains commonly found crosslinguistically are active in the language, it seems that EP may lack this prosodic constituent. Therefore, the goal of this article is to systematically investigate the role of the foot in a number of areas within EP grammar. In our study, we defend some new approaches to several long-standing issues in EP phonology and we conclude that many facts of the language can be, in fact, better understood resorting to the foot domain. Namely, the distribution of stress in the most frequent morphological classes (thematic non-verbs and present tense verbs), -inh-/-zinh- diminutive formation, the domain for regular vowel reduction, obligatory glide formation, the stress window, and poetic rhyme seem to benefit from a metrically-governed account. By contrast, other facts, such as vowel lowering, word clipping, minimal words, secondary stress, and schwa deletion are shown not to be conditioned by the foot in EP. Importantly, the evidence we found for metrical structure only cues the prominent foot of the word, suggesting that pretonic material may not be footed. All in all, in addition to shedding light on facts previously poorly understood, and exposing some noteworthy specificities of EP in the realm of Romance languages and other varieties of Portuguese, we draw implications for the universal characterization of the prosodic hierarchy and its acquisition. Full article

European Portuguese (EP) is characterized by a large number of nasals encompassing five phonemic nasal vowels. One notable characteristic of these sounds is their dynamic nature, involving both oral and nasal gestures, which makes their study and characterization challenging. The study of nasal vowels, in particular, has been addressed using a wide range of technologies: early descriptions were based on acoustics and nasalance, later expanded with articulatory data obtained from EMA and real-time magnetic resonance (RT-MRI). While providing important results, these studies were limited by the discrete nature of the EMA-pellets, providing only a small grasp of the vocal tract; by the small time resolution of the MRI data; and by the small number of speakers. To tackle these limitations, and to take advantage of recent advances in RT-MRI allowing 50 fps, novel articulatory data has been acquired for 11 EP speakers. The work presented here explores the capabilities of recently proposed data-driven approaches to model articulatory data extracted from RT-MRI to assess their suitability for investigating the dynamic characteristics of nasal vowels. To this end, we explore vocal tract configurations over time, along with the coordination of velum and lip aperture in oral and nasal bilabial contexts for nasal vowels and oral congeners. Overall, the results show that both generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs) and functional linear mixed models (FLMMs) provide an elegant approach to tackle the data from multiple speakers. More specifically, we found oro-pharyngeal differences in the tongue configurations for low and mid nasal vowels: vowel track aperture was larger in the pharyngeal and smaller in the palatal region for the three non-high nasal vowels, providing evidence of a raised and more advanced tongue position of the nasal vowels. Even though this work is aimed at exploring the applicability of the methods, the outcomes already highlight interesting data for the dynamic characterization of EP nasal vowels. Full article

For aging speech, there is limited knowledge regarding the articulatory adjustments underlying the acoustic findings observed in previous studies. In order to investigate the age-related articulatory differences in European Portuguese (EP) vowels, the present study analyzes the tongue configuration of the nine EP oral vowels (isolated context and pseudoword context) produced by 10 female speakers of two different age groups (young and old). From the tongue contours automatically segmented from the US images and manually revised, the parameters (tongue height and tongue advancement) were extracted. The results suggest that the tongue tends to be higher and more advanced for the older females compared to the younger ones for almost all vowels. Thus, the vowel articulatory space tends to be higher, advanced, and bigger with age. For older females, unlike younger females that presented a sharp reduction in the articulatory vowel space in disyllabic sequences, the vowel space tends to be more advanced for isolated vowels compared with vowels produced in disyllabic sequences. This study extends our pilot research by reporting articulatory data from more speakers based on an improved automatic method of tongue contours tracing, and it performs an inter-speaker comparison through the application of a novel normalization procedure. Full article

This study tests whether Australian English (AusE) and European Spanish (ES) listeners differ in their categorisation and discrimination of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowels. In particular, we investigate two theoretically relevant measures of vowel category overlap (acoustic vs. perceptual categorisation) as predictors of non-native discrimination difficulty. We also investigate whether the individual listener’s own native vowel productions predict non-native vowel perception better than group averages. The results showed comparable performance for AusE and ES participants in their perception of the BP vowels. In particular, discrimination patterns were largely dependent on contrast-specific learning scenarios, which were similar across AusE and ES. We also found that acoustic similarity between individuals’ own native productions and the BP stimuli were largely consistent with the participants’ patterns of non-native categorisation. Furthermore, the results indicated that both acoustic and perceptual overlap successfully predict discrimination performance. However, accuracy in discrimination was better explained by perceptual similarity for ES listeners and by acoustic similarity for AusE listeners. Interestingly, we also found that for ES listeners, the group averages explained discrimination accuracy better than predictions based on individual production data, but that the AusE group showed no difference. Full article

Studies show that second language (L2) learners’ perceptual patterns differ depending on their native dialect (e.g., Chládková and Podlipský 2011; Escudero and Williams 2012). Likewise, speakers from the same native language background show different perceptual patterns depending on the dialect to which they are exposed (e.g., Escudero and Boersma 2004; Escudero and Chládková 2010). The Second Language Linguistic Perception model (L2LP; Escudero 2005) accounts for these differences, explicitly stating that the acoustic similarity between the native and target dialect affects L2 perception. This study investigated whether Californian English monolingual and Spanish–English bilingual listeners differ in their perception of European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowels. Escudero et al. (2009a) showed that there were differences in the acoustic realization of vowels in BP and EP. Stressed vowels were longer in BP than in EP, with differences in vowel height observed for some vowels (e.g., /ɛ/ is higher in EP than in BP). According to the L2LP model, these acoustic differences between dialects will affect vowel perception; therefore, we predicted that there would be differences in the listeners’ perception of certain vowel contrasts in BP and EP. Participants completed a non-native categorization task and a discrimination task presented in the XAB format. The results from the non-native categorization task predicted differential vowel perception depending on both the dialect and vowel contrast that listeners heard, which were mostly confirmed with an interaction between dialect and contrast in the discrimination results. We contextualize these results with respect to models of L2 speech perception, highlighting that dialectal differences impact language perception and may influence later language learning. Full article