| The present study explores L1-Spanish speakers' learning of the English /i/--/I/ contrast via acoustic analysis of vowel productions and perception of synthetic stimuli. L1-English, L1-Spanish, and L2-Spanish perception and production are also explored. The vowels examined are English /i/, /I/, adjacent English /e/, /epsilon/, and Spanish /i/, /ei/, /e/. The acoustic properties examined are vowel duration, and initial and final first- and second-formant values. Diphthongisation/vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) is an important factor in the perception of /I/ in the Canadian English dialect examined. Consistent with current theories that L1 and L2 learners build speech sound categories on the basis of the statistical distribution of acoustic properties, discriminant analysis and logistic regression are used to build models of production and perception data. Models trained on monolingual Spanish data predict that Spanish listeners just beginning to learn English will perceive most instances of English /i/ as Spanish /i/, and most instances of English /I/ as Spanish /e/; hence English /i/ and /I/ will be easily distinguished. However, cross-sectional and longitudinal data from L1-Spanish learners of English suggest that they confuse English /i/ and /I/, and begin to distinguish them via a multidimensional category-goodness-difference assimilation to Spanish /i/. A minority of L2-English learners are hypothesised to label more-Spanish-/i/-like vowels (short duration, low F1, zero VISC) as English /i/, and less-Spanish-/i/-like vowels (longer duration, higher F1, converging VISC) as English /I/. Since spectral cues are used in the same direction by L1-English listeners and are most important for L1-English listeners, this immediately results in relatively L1-English-like perception. However, the results for the majority of L2-English participants were consistent with them beginning with the reverse labelling, and, since only duration cues are positively correlated with L1-English speakers' productions, increased exposure to English leads to a greater weighting for duration cues. Eventually L1-English-like use of spectral cues may be bootstrapped off duration cues. The initial association of English /I/ with good examples of Spanish /i/ is hypothesised to be due to (mis)education/orthography, rather than phonetic/perceptual factors. |
