P. Escudero and D. Williams: JASA Express Letters [http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.

3701708] Published Online 18 April 2012

Native dialect inuences second-language vowel

perception: Peruvian versus Iberian Spanish
learners of Dutch
Paola Escuderoa)
MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney, Building 1, Bullecourt Avenue,
Milperra, New South Wales 2214, Australia
paola.escudero@uws.edu.au

Daniel Williams
Department of Human Communication Sciences/Department of Germanic Studies,
University of Shefeld, Jessop West, Upper Hanover Street,
Shefeld S3 7RA, United Kingdom
gep09dpw@shefeld.ac.uk

Abstract: Peruvian Spanish (PS) and Iberian Spanish (IS) learners

were tested on their ability to categorically discriminate and identify
Dutch vowels. It was predicted that the acoustic differences between the
vowel productions of the two dialects, which compare differently to
Dutch vowels, would manifest in differential L2 perception for listeners
of these two dialects. The results show that although PS learners had
higher general L2 prociency, IS learners were more accurate at
discriminating all ve contrasts and at identifying six of the L2 Dutch
vowels. These ndings conrm that acoustic differences in native vowel
production lead to differential L2 vowel perception.
V
C 2012 Acoustical Society of America

PACS numbers: 43.71.Ft, 43.71.Es, 43.71.An [DO]

Date Received: January 24, 2012 Date Accepted: March 19, 2012

1. Introduction
Some Dutch vowel contrasts such as /-a/ and /I-i/ pose perceptual problems for
Spanish listeners, regardless of their level of general prociency in the Dutch language,
as shown recently in Escudero and Wanrooij (2010). Escudero and Williams (2011)
have shown that this difculty arises because Spanish listeners perceive the vowels in
each Dutch contrast in terms of a single Spanish phoneme, namely, /a/ and /i/, respec-
tively. The Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) (Best, 1995), PAM extended to L2
learners (Best and Tyler, 2007), and the Second Language Linguistic Perception Model
(L2LP) (Escudero, 2005) propose and give evidence for the fact that non-native sound
contrasts that are mapped on to a single native category lead to the most difculty in
discrimination and learning.
Escudero and Wanrooij (2010) investigated the perception of Dutch vowels by
beginning and advanced Spanish learners who were native speakers of various Spanish
dialects (e.g., Iberian Spanish, Peruvian Spanish, Chilean Spanish, Mexican Spanish,
etc.). Recent studies have shown that the variety or dialect of ones own native lan-
guage can affect the perception of non-native sounds. For instance, Mayr and Escu-
dero (2010) found that the variation in English listeners responses to German rounded
vowels in a perceptual assimilation task could be attributed to the listeners different
L1 English dialects, i.e., whether they were from Southern or Northern England. While
Escudero and Mayr did not formally control for native dialect in their experimental
design, a study which systematically controlled for this variable is Chldkov and
Author's complimentary copy

a)
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

EL406 J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 131 (5), May 2012 V

C 2012 Acoustical Society of America
P. Escudero and D. Williams: JASA Express Letters [http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.3701708] Published Online 18 April 2012

Podlipsk (2011). These authors investigated the perceptual assimilation of Dutch vow-
els to Czech vowels by Bohemian Czech (BC) and Moravian Czech (MC) listeners. A
prominent difference between these two dialects is the /i-I/ contrast, which is realized
in terms of both spectrum and duration in the former dialect (/i/ has a lower rst
formant (F1) and is longer than /I/), while durational differences mainly contrast the
vowels in the latter (/i/ is longer than /I/). These differences explain the authors nding
that BC listeners most frequently assimilated the Dutch vowel /i/ to the Czech vowel
/i/ whereas MC listeners mainly assimilated it to the Czech vowel /I/. The authors pre-
dict a difference in how listeners of these two Czech dialects learn the Dutch /i-I/
contrast.
These ndings are in line with the L2LP model, which explicitly states that lis-
teners perception of both native and non-native sounds should match the acoustic
properties of the relevant sounds in their native dialect (Escudero and Boersma, 2004;
Escudero, 2005). For native listeners, evidence for this proposal comes from the differ-
ential perception of the same tokens of /i/ and /I/ by native Scottish English and South-
ern British English listeners reported in Escudero and Boersma (2004). For L2 listen-
ers, it has been shown that the acoustic properties of the target dialect or language
affect L2 perception: Spanish learners of Scottish English mostly classied English /i/
and /I/ as Spanish /i/ and /e/, respectively, while the same English vowels were both
classied mainly as Spanish /i/ by Spanish learners of Southern British English (Escu-
dero, 2005). Similarly, Spanish listeners perceived // and // as Spanish /a/ and /e/,
respectively, if produced by Canadian French speakers, but as Spanish /a/, if produced
by Canadian English speakers (Escudero and Vasiliev, 2011), due to the different
acoustic realizations of the vowels in these two languages. Additionally, Escudero
et al. (2012) demonstrate that differences in the acoustic realizations of the Dutch vow-
els /I, , a, /, as produced in North Holland and in Flanders, lead to different assimi-
lation patterns and L2 perception accuracy for Southern British English // and //.
In the present study, we examine whether a native dialect effect is found in the
L2 vowel perception of a subset of Escudero and Wanrooijs (2010) learners, speci-
cally those whose native dialect is either Peruvian Spanish (PS) or Iberian Spanish (IS).
Unlike Escudero and Wanrooij, we also included learners with intermediate levels of
Dutch prociency. This allowed for a more thorough investigation of the effect of
general L2 prociency, as measured by a listening comprehension task, on L2 vowel
perception accuracy. Although Escudero and Wanrooij could not nd an effect of L2
prociency, the separation of native dialect and L2 prociency here could yield such
an effect. If so, the PS learners in this study, who have higher average L2 prociency
than the IS learners, are predicted to have the highest accuracy.
Figure 1 plots mean F1 and second formant (F2) values for 12 Dutch vowels
/, a, , e, , I, i, O, u, o, , Y/ that were produced by male and female speakers and
reported in Adank et al. (2004). These Dutch vowel tokens were used in Escudero and

Author's complimentary copy

Fig. 1. Average F1/F2 vowel space for Dutch (white symbols, gray circles), Peruvian Spanish (black symbols)
and Iberian Spanish (grey symbols) vowels, for male (left) and female (right) speakers separately. Ellipses repre-
sent one standard deviation from the mean.

J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 131 (5), May 2012 P. Escudero and D. Williams: Native dialect and second-language perception EL407
P. Escudero and D. Williams: JASA Express Letters [http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.3701708] Published Online 18 April 2012

Wanrooij (2010) and are also used as stimuli in the present study. They were extracted
from an sVs context (V vowel) and the formants were measured at the vowel mid-
point. The gure also displays mean F1 and F2 values of the ve IS and PS vowels /i,
e, a, o, u/ for male and female speakers. These IS and PS formant measurements
come from Spanish vowels produced in the most similar consonantal context to the
Dutch vowels, namely, sVse and sVso, which were reported in Chldkov et al. (2011)
along with IS and PS vowels produced in various other consonantal contexts.
It appears that /a/ exhibits a lower F1 in PS, /o/ has a lower F2 in PS, /e/ has
a higher F2 in PS than IS and vowels generally exhibit longer durations in PS than in
IS. These acoustic differences are conrmed in Chldkov et al. (2011) by statistical
analyses across all the various reported consonant contexts. For the sVse and sVso
contexts, signicant between-dialect differences were found in F1 for /a/ and in F2 for
/i, o, u/ and marginally for /a/, which, according to the authors, result from the differ-
ential production of the anking /s/ consonants in PS and IS. As shown in the gure,
PS has a visibly lower F1 for /a/, a visibly lower F2 for /a, o, u/ and a visibly higher
F2 for /i/ than IS.
PS and IS learners are expected to have very similar perception of the Dutch
vowels that are acoustically dissimilar to all Spanish vowels in both dialects, i.e., /y, Y,
/. However, the signicant acoustic differences outlined above predict at least two
possible differences between them. First, although the Dutch /i-I/ will be difcult for
both groups, it may be more difcult for PS learners because their /i/ is acoustically
midway between Dutch /i/ and /I/, which will result in both Dutch vowels being equally
assimilated to PS /i/ and poorly discriminated. In contrast, IS /i/ appears to be acousti-
cally closer to Dutch /I/ than to Dutch /i/, which will result in a case of category-
goodness assimilation within the PAM (Best, 1995) and moderate to good discrimina-
tion. Second, the discrimination of the Dutch contrast /a-/ will also be slightly easier
for IS learners because Dutch /a/ and // are acoustically more similar to the two IS vowels
/a/ and /o/, respectively, than to the PS counterparts.
While L2 prociency may suggest an advantage for PS learners, the differences
in the acoustic properties of PS and IS vowels and how they compare differently to
Dutch vowels predict an IS advantage. Here, we compare the IS and PS learners
vowel perception in the same two tasks reported in Escudero and Wanrooijs (2010,
Experiment 1), i.e., categorical discrimination and forced-choice identication.

2. Methodology
2.1 Participants
Here, 51 PS and 48 IS learners of Dutch were selected for the present analysis. The PS
learners mostly came from Lima, and many of the IS learners came from Madrid and
the region around it. All participants spoke the standard variety of Spanish of their
respective country and they were all living in the Netherlands at the time of testing.
The learners prociency in the Dutch language was determined with a general
listening comprehension task, which is part of Dialang, a standard language
assessment tool (see http://lancs.ac.uk/researchenterprise/dialang/about; Alderson and
Huhta, 2005). In this task, learners are given one of six possible scores, which in order
of prociency from lowest to highest are: A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2. These scores
were coded as a number from one to six to compare the learner groups prociency,
and it was found that PS learners average prociency score (C1) was higher than that
of IS learners (A1) (t[97] 2.83, p 0.006). The PS group included 12 beginning (A1
and A2) and 21 advanced learners (C1 and C2) from Escudero and Wanrooij, as well
as 18 learners with intermediate prociency (B1 and B2) whose vowel perception has
not been previously reported. The IS group included 27 beginning and 15 advanced
Author's complimentary copy

Dutch learners from Escudero and Wanrooij, as well as six new learners with interme-
diate prociency. If Dutch prociency alone inuences L2 vowel perception, PS learn-
ers should perform better overall in tasks involving Dutch vowel perception.

EL408 J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 131 (5), May 2012 P. Escudero and D. Williams: Native dialect and second-language perception
P. Escudero and D. Williams: JASA Express Letters [http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.3701708] Published Online 18 April 2012

2.2 Stimuli and procedure

Listeners performed the same two vowel perception tasks reported in Escudero and
Wanrooij (2010), namely, a two-alternative forced choice categorization task in an
XAB format, followed by a 12-alternative forced choice identication task. The rst
task was a purely auditory one, where listeners heard three vowels and were asked to
decide whether the rst sound (X) was more like the second (A) or the third (B). In
the second, they heard one vowel and were asked to choose from the orthographic rep-
resentations of 12 Dutch vowels which were presented visually on a computer screen.
These two tasks tested Dutch vowel perception with (second task) and without (rst
task) orthographic response options, since Escudero and Wanrooij demonstrated that
L1 orthography has a considerable effect on L2 vowel perception.
As reported in Escudero and Wanrooij and mentioned in the Introduction, the
X stimuli in the rst task and the single vowel sounds in the second task were naturally
produced tokens of Dutch vowels, which were a subset of the corpus of Adank et al.
(2004). They were extracted from sVs words produced in sentences by 20 speakers of
Northern Standard Dutch (10 male and 10 female). Thus, listeners were presented with
240 vowel tokens (20 speakers  12 vowels), whose average F1 and F2 values are
shown in Fig. 1.
The rst task targeted only ve Dutch vowel contrasts, namely, /a-/, /i-I/,
/y-/, /i-y/, and /I-/, and thus included only 100 different tokens from the 240 men-
tioned above. The order of the ve XAB contrasts was counterbalanced across listen-
ers. As reported in Escudero and Wanrooij (2010, pp. 352353), while X was a natu-
rally produced token, the two auditory response options A and B were synthetic vowel
tokens, which were based on the average values of the corresponding Dutch vowels
produced by male speakers. Each XAB contrast contained 40 trials, yielding 200 trials
in the whole task. The order of the auditory responses A and B in each trial was ran-
domly selected by the presentation software.
The second task targeted all 12 Dutch vowels, and therefore included all 240
tokens. In this task, the tokens were presented one by one, for a total of 240 trials. Lis-
teners were asked to choose from the orthographic representations of the 12 Dutch
vowels, <a, aa, e, ee, eu, i, ie, o, oe, oo, u, uu> corresponding to /, a, , e, , I, i, O,
u, o, , y/.
For both tasks, listeners were presented with a familiarization session of ve
to ten trials in order to make sure that they could all perform these tasks. There was a
500 ms interval between a click on the chosen response and the presentation of the
next trial. The tasks were self-paced in that the next trial would only appear after the
click on a response, but listeners were encouraged to respond as quickly as possible
and to guess if unsure. The tasks took approximately 50 min (including breaks between
each XAB contrast and within the identication task). Listeners were paid 10 Euros
for their participation.

3. Results
Table 1 shows the percentage of correct responses for the rst task. Both groups dis-
crimination accuracy appears to be similar to that of the beginning and advanced

Table 1. XAB mean percentage correct responses for Peruvian Spanish (PS) and Iberian Spanish (IS) learners.
Standard deviations are shown in brackets.

Percentage correct (%)

Dialect group /a-/ /-y/ /I-i/ /-I/ /i-/ All contrasts

Author's complimentary copy

PS 55 (11) 69 (11) 63 (11) 68 (9) 80 (11) 67 (13)

IS 60 (12) 71 (12) 68 (11) 67 (10) 82 (9) 70 (13)

J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 131 (5), May 2012 P. Escudero and D. Williams: Native dialect and second-language perception EL409
P. Escudero and D. Williams: JASA Express Letters [http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.3701708] Published Online 18 April 2012

learners but very different from that of the native Dutch listeners reported in Escudero
and Wanrooij (2010, Table 5). A repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA)
was run on the PS and IS groups arcsine-transformed percentage correct responses
with Contrast as within-subject factor (ve levels) and Dialect as between-subject fac-
tor (two levels: PS or IS). There were main effects of Contrast (F[4,388] 66.64;
p < 0.001) and Dialect (F[1,97] 5.12; p 0.026), which indicates that different con-
trasts yielded different accuracies and that PS learners were overall less accurate than
IS learners. As shown in Table 1, the more difcult contrasts for both dialect groups
were /a-/ and /i-I/, as expected. Although there was no signicant Contrast  Dialect
interaction (p > 0.05), the table indicates that the main effect of dialect seems to be
driven by a difference in the groups performance for /a-/ and /i-I/.
Table 2 shows the mean percentage classications for the 12 Dutch vowels as
the 12 orthographic labels. In line with the discrimination results, both groups per-
formed similarly to the beginning and advanced learners but very differently from the
Dutch natives reported in Escudero and Wanrooij (2010, Table 6). PS and IS learners
had considerable difculty with correctly identifying the ve Dutch vowels /i, y, I, ,
u/, scoring less than 35% correct on each. A repeated-measures ANOVA was run on
all PS and IS groups arcsine-transformed correct identication percentages with Vowel
as within-subject factor (12 levels) and Dialect as between-subjects factor (two levels:
PS or IS). Unsurprisingly, there was a main effect of Vowel (F[11, 1067, 0.71]
139.50; p < 0.001), indicating that some vowels were more difcult than others.
Unlike the results of the rst task, there was no signicant main effect of Dialect

Table 2. Mean percentage identication for Peruvian Spanish and Iberian Spanish learners. Correct responses
are in bold, only responses higher than 5% are shown.

Orthographic responses (%)

Dutch Dialect
stimulus group <a> <aa> <e> <ee> <eu> <i> <ie> <o> <oe> <oo> <u> <uu>

// PS 61 22 - - - - - 8 - - - -
IS 70 10 - - - - - 16 - - - -
/a/ PS 14 83 - - - - - - - - - -
IS 8 91 - - - - - - - - - -
// PS - - 67 13 6 - - - - - - -
IS - - 76 9 - - - - - - - -
/e/ PS - - 22 61 - - 9 - - - - -
IS - - 15 71 7 - - - - - - -
// PS - - 8 16 57 - - - - - 5
IS - - 5 15 53 - - - 6 12 - -
/I/ PS - - 23 - - 35 15 - - - 11 -
IS - - 31 - - 34 11 - - - 16 -
/i/ PS - - - - - 44 34 - - - 9 -
IS - - - - - 57 28 - - - 10 -
/O/ PS 7 - - - - - - 56 - 22 - -
IS 7 - - - - - - 74 - 12 - -
/u/ PS - - - - - - - - 33 - 41 19
IS - - - - - - - - 34 - 49 13
/o/ PS - - - - 6 - - 12 11 68 - -
IS - - - - 8 - - 6 16 68 - -
// PS - - 30 - 16 - - - 8 - 25 9
IS - - 35 - 10 - - - 8 - 33 -
Author's complimentary copy

/y/ PS - - - - - 7 - - 11 - 54 18
IS - - - - - 7 - - 8 - 64 15

EL410 J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 131 (5), May 2012 P. Escudero and D. Williams: Native dialect and second-language perception
P. Escudero and D. Williams: JASA Express Letters [http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.3701708] Published Online 18 April 2012

(p > 0.05), but there was a signicant Vowel  Dialect interaction (F[11, 1067,
0.71] 3.80; p < 0.001), which suggests that the two groups differ in their correct
identication responses for some Dutch vowels. Independent samples t-tests with
a 0.004 (12 comparisons) revealed a dialect difference for /O/ (t[97] 5.11, p (two-
tailed) < 0.001). At the uncorrected a of 0.05, the groups differed for // (t[97] 2.40,
p 0.018), /a/ (t[97] 2.26, p 0.026), /e/ (t[97] 2.02, p 0.046), // (t[97] 2.40,
p 0.018), and // (t[97] 2.67, p 0.009). As shown in Table 2, IS learners were in all
cases more accurate than PS learners.
In order to test for the comparative effect of Dutch prociency versus Spanish
dialect in vowel discrimination, we ran Spearmans rank correlations between the
scores for all ve Dutch vowel contrasts, Dutch prociency (six levels: A1-C2), and lis-
teners Spanish dialect (two levels: PS or IS). There were no signicant correlations
between scores and prociency (p > 0.05). However, there was a signicant correlation
only between the Dutch /a-/ scores and dialect (q 0.21, p < 0.05), which indicates
that the overall between-dialect difference found by the above ANOVA was indeed
driven by differences in scores for this particular contrast. A second set of Spearmans
rank correlations were run on the correct identication scores, Dutch prociency, and
listeners Spanish dialect. A positive correlation between scores and prociency reached
signicance for only two vowels, namely, // (q 0.27, p < 0.05) and /e/ (q 0.22,
p < 0.05), while there was a signicant positive correlation between dialect and scores
for all six vowels (q 0.210.48, p < 0.05). Thus, native dialect seems to better explain
the differences between PS and IS L2 vowel perception than Dutch prociency.
4. Discussion
In line with Escudero and Wanrooijs (2010) results, IS and PS learners had the most
difculty with Dutch /a-/, followed by /i-I/, and both groups had great difculty in
correctly identifying the ve Dutch vowels /i, y, I, , u/. Most importantly, IS learners
were more accurate than PS learners in discriminating the two most difcult contrasts,
i.e., /a-/ and /i-I/ regardless of Dutch prociency and they identied the Dutch vow-
els /O, , a, e, , / more accurately than PS learners. These results suggest that acous-
tic differences in the production of IS and PS vowels lead to a difference in L2 vowel
perception, but are in contradiction to an L2 experience hypothesis which predicts the
highest performance for the PS learners.
The acoustic hypothesis is in line with the L2LP model (Escudero, 2005),
which proposes that dialect-specic differences in vowel production will lead to differ-
ences in native and L2 vowel perception. In that respect, although both IS and PS
have only /a/ where Dutch has /a/ and //, the acoustic properties of the IS /a-o/ con-
trast make it a better t for hearing the Dutch /a-/ contrast than PS /a-o/, as shown
in Fig. 1. Specically, the IS vowels /a/ and /o/ have higher F1 values than the corre-
sponding PS vowels, which make them acoustically closer to Dutch /a/ and //.
According to the L2LP model, which relies on the comparison of acoustic properties
between dialects and languages, IS learners will be better able to distinguish the Dutch
vowels at the onset of learning because they are more likely to map them onto two
Spanish vowels. The model further predicts that IS learners will have the easier learn-
ing task of adjusting category boundaries in their L2. This proposal is supported by
the fact that IS learners had higher accuracy than PS learners for Dutch /a/ and // in
both tasks.
The acoustic hypothesis is also supported through inspection of the errors in
the identication task. First, IS learners confused Dutch /i/ with Dutch /I/ more fre-
quently than PS learners (57% and 44%, respectively), which can be explained by the
fact that their /i/ is acoustically closest to Dutch /I/, as shown in Fig. 1. Second, IS
learners confused // with // more frequently than PS learners (35% versus 30%,
Author's complimentary copy

respectively), whereas PS learners confused // with /y/ more frequently (9% versus
5%), which is because IS /e/ is closer to // than PS /e/ (Fig. 1). Third, although both
groups confused Dutch /O/ and /o/, PS learners had a higher confusion rate (22%

J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 131 (5), May 2012 P. Escudero and D. Williams: Native dialect and second-language perception EL411
P. Escudero and D. Williams: JASA Express Letters [http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.3701708] Published Online 18 April 2012

versus 12%), which is because PS /o/ has a lower F2 than IS /o/, making PS /o/ acous-
tically closer to both Dutch /O/ and /o/, and leading to more confusions between these
vowels. Finally, PS scores for Dutch /e/ and // where lower than IS scores (61% and
67% for PS versus 70% and 76% for IS), which may be because PS /e/ lies acoustically
midway between Dutch /e/ and //, while IS /e/ is closest to Dutch //.1
In sum, the different acoustic properties of PS and IS vowels and the differen-
ces in their acoustic comparison to Dutch vowels appears to explain why IS learners
outperform PS learners in Dutch vowel perception, despite the fact that the latter
generally have higher L2 prociency. These results, which were predicted by the L2LP
model, suggest a long-lasting effect of the acoustic properties of ones native dialect on
L2 perception.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by grant 275.75.005 from the Netherlands Organization for
Scientic Research (NWO) awarded to the rst author.

References and links

1
There are other acoustic cues that distinguish these vowels, such as the formant movement exhibited in Dutch
/e/, which could differ between the two Spanish dialects but were not considered in the present study.
Adank, P., Van Hout, R., and Smits, R. (2004). An acoustic description of the vowels of Northern and
Southern Standard Dutch, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 116, 17291738.
Alderson, J. C., and Huhta, A. (2005). The development of a suite of computer-based diagnostic tests
based on the Common European Framework, Language Testing 22, 301320.
Best, C. T. (1995). A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception, in Speech Perception and
Linguistic Experience: Issues in Cross-Language Research, edited by W. Strange (York Press, Timonium,
MD), pp. 171204.
Best, C. T., and Tyler, M. D. (2007). Non-native and second-language speech perception: commonalities
and complementarities, in Language Experience in Second-Language Speech Learning: In Honor of James
Emil Flege, edited by O.-S. Bohn and M. Munro (John Benjamins, Amsterdam), pp. 1334.
Chldkov, K., Escudero, P., and Boersma, P. (2011). Context-specic acoustic differences between
Peruvian and Iberian Spanish vowels, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 130, 416428.
Chldkov, K., and Podlipsk, V. J. (2011). Native dialect matters: Perceptual assimilation of Dutch
vowels by Czech listeners, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 130, EL186EL192.
Escudero, P. (2005). Linguistic perception and second language acquisition: Explaining the attainment of
optimal phonological categorization, Ph.D. thesis, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands.
Escudero, P., and Boersma, P. (2004). Bridging the gap between L2 speech perception research and
phonological theory, Stud. Second Lang. Acquis. 26, 551585.
Escudero, P., Simon, E., and Mitterer, H. (2012). Dialectal differences in vowel production lead to
differences in cross-language and L2 perception: Dutch and Flemish learners of English vowels,
J. Phonetics 40, 280288.
Escudero, P., and Vasiliev, P. (2011). Cross-language acoustic similarity predicts perceptual assimilation
of Canadian English and Canadian French vowels, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 130, EL277EL283.
Escudero, P., and Wanrooij, K. (2010). The effect of L1 orthography on non-native and L2 vowel percep-
tion, Lang. Speech 53, 343365.
Escudero, P., and Williams, D. (2011). Perceptual assimilation of Dutch vowels by Peruvian Spanish
listeners, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 129, EL1EL7.
Mayr, R., and Escudero, P. (2010). Explaining individual variation in L2 perception: Rounded vowels in
English learners of German, Biling. Lang. Cognit. 13, 279297. Author's complimentary copy

EL412 J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 131 (5), May 2012 P. Escudero and D. Williams: Native dialect and second-language perception