L2 Perception of Contrastive Vowel Nasality in Brazilian Portuguese

Author:

Laméris Tim Joris1

Affiliation:

1. University of Cambridge , Cambridge , UK

Abstract

Abstract Although not undisputed, it is generally agreed that Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has lexically contrastive vowel nasality, for instance between [si] ‘if; oneself‘ and [sĩ] ‘yes.‘ It is known that second-language (L2) learners of BP struggle with oral-nasal vowel contrasts in perception, but less is known on how L2 learners perform in perception. This paper reports on a study that investigated the perception of BP contrastive vowel nasality by a group of English-native learners of BP and a native speaker control group to assess how non-native listeners perform in pre-lexical discrimination and lexical identification of contrastive vowel nasality. Although results from a vowel discrimination task revealed no differences between L2 and L1 listeners in terms of pre-lexical perception, a lexical identification task revealed that some oral-nasal vowel contrasts impeded lexical access in L2 listeners. These findings highlight how L2 listeners can perform comparably to L1 listeners in perception of non-native sound contrasts (here, vowel nasality) at the pre-lexical level, but may still struggle in encoding those contrasts at a lexical level.

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Subject

General Medicine

Reference51 articles.

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3. Beddor, Patrice Speeter & Winifred Strange. 1982. Cross-language study of perception of the oral–nasal distinction. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 71(6). 1551–1561. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.387809.

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