Perception of Catalan vowels and diphthongs by native English speakers

Models of second language speech (L2) base their predictions about perception and production of L2 sounds on the degree of similarity between native and non-native sounds. This study presents the results of a cross-linguistic perception experiment involving English and Catalan vowels. A group of English-speaking listeners performed a rated dissimilarity task in which they had to indicate the perceived similarity between two vowel sounds. Stimuli consisted of English-English and Catalan- English vowel pairs. The results showed that some Catalan-English pairs obtained dissimilarity ratings that were comparable to same-category English-English pairs, while other pairs had ratings that fell between same- category and different category English-English pairs. The results will be discussed in terms of their consequences for L2 categorization and in light of previous findings involving Catalan listeners.