2006/09/27

Cebrian, J. (2006). Experience and the use of non-native duration in L2 vowel categorization. Journal of Phonetics, 34, 372–387.

Presentation: Sally
Summary: Sarah

This paper attempts to study whether L2 experience can facilitate discrimination of L2 vowels, and what cues are used for identification. In this study, Catalan and English are the L1 and L2, respectively. The first experiment was to see whether Catalan speakers with English experience could distinguish English and Catalan vowels better than Catalan speakers without English experience. No positive effect between experience and vowel discrimination was found. Results also showed that L2 experience actually diminished speakers’ ability to identify L1 vowels. The second experiment was designed to see which cues, durational or spectral, English-learning Catalan speakers adopted to identify English vowels. Results showed that while native English speakers used spectral cues to discern vowels, Catalan speakers relied more on duration, which is not a distinctive feature of Catalan vowels. The author concluded that language experience does not make discerning vowels easier, and L2 learners tend to depend on a new cue that is not one of the features in their L1 when discerning L2 vowels.