Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508

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Journal of Phonetics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/phonetics

Native Catalan learners’ perception and production of English vowels

Lucrecia Rallo Fabra a,n, Joaquı́n Romero b
a
Departament de Filologia Espanyola, Moderna i Llatina, Edifici Ramon Llull, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Ctra. Valldemossa, km. 7.5, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain
b
Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain

a r t i c l e i n f o abstract

Article history: This paper reports two experiments on nonnative vowel perception and production. In Experiment 1,
Received 23 November 2007 three groups of Catalan learners varying in English proficiency were tested on their ability to
Received in revised form discriminate seven Catalan–English (C–E) and four English–English (E–E) vowel contrasts. The vowel
19 December 2011
contrasts were natural speech tokens obtained from native Catalan and native American English
Accepted 7 January 2012
speakers. On average, listeners distinguished the C–E /i–i / contrast relatively well, and they could
Available online 23 February 2012
partially distinguish /i–i/, /u–u/, and /a–>/, but they had great difficulty with the /a–e/, /a–æ/ and /e–e/
contrasts. As for the E–E pairs, the learners could discriminate the speech sounds in the /i–i / and /u–R/
pairs, suggesting that learners may have established new phonetic categories for /i / and /R/. In
Experiment 2, a subgroup of the Catalan learners and a control group of native English speakers
produced words containing one of the English vowels /i/, /i /, /e/, /æ/, />/, /e/, /R/, and /u/. Vowel
accuracy was assessed by means of acoustic measurements and by native listener judgments. The
acoustic measurements revealed that, in spectral terms, learners produced vowels that were less
peripheral than the native English (NE) versions, although there was a tendency for vowel expansion as
a function of language proficiency. Vowel duration in the tense–lax vowel pairs also progressed toward
more nativelike values in the productions of the more proficient learners. Finally, the NE listener
judgments showed that most learners produced the vowels /i /, /æ/, /R/, and /u/ intelligibly but with
significantly lower goodness ratings than did the NE speakers.
& 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction English sentences by native Korean speakers as age of arrival in

One of the major goals of L2 learners is to become fluent
speakers and pronounce the sounds of the target language with-
out a foreign accent. However, not all learners succeed in this
endeavour. Various factors account for accented perception and
production of L2 speech. Flege, Schirru, and MacKay (2003)
classify these factors into three types: maturational factors,
amount and nature of L2 input, and interaction of L1–L2 sound
systems. A growing number of speech perception studies have
suggested that the mechanisms that are operative for L1 acquisi-
tion are less effective as starting age of exposure to the L2
increases (Johnson & Newport, 1989; Pallier, Bosch, & Sebastián-
Gallés, 1997; Sanders, Yamada, & Neville, 1999). As a conse-
quence, learners who were first exposed to the target language in
childhood tend to be more successful than learners whose
exposure started later in life. Flege, Yeni-Komshian, and Liu
(1999) reported stronger foreign accents in the pronunciation of
n the L2 sounds accurately. As a consequence, it seems unlikely
Corresponding author. Tel.: þ34 971173019; fax: þ34 971173473.
E-mail addresses: lucrecia.rallo@uib.es (L. Rallo Fabra),
joaquin.romero@urv.cat (J. Romero).
the United States increased. Tsukada et al. (2005) found that
native Korean children discriminated English vowel contrasts
better than adults. These children also outperformed adults in a
production task, in which acoustic distances between the target
vowels produced by the children fell within the value range of
those produced by their native English-speaking peers.
Failure to produce the target sounds accurately can also be
attributed to the quality of the input learners have received.
Learners who have acquired the target language in a naturalistic
setting, and those who have learned the L2 through formal
classroom instruction represent two distinct populations. In this
respect, work by Flege et al. with an Italian community living in
Ottawa for an average of 20 years (Flege, Frieda, & Nozawa, 1997;
Flege, MacKay, & Meador, 1999; Piske, Flege, MacKay, & Meador,
2002) showed that some late learners achieve ‘‘nativelike’’ pro-
nunciation despite their late exposure to English.
The instructional setting does not always provide the best
conditions for speech learning, partly because many foreign
language teachers themselves do not succeed in producing
that students who are regularly exposed to foreign-accented
speech will ever achieve nativelike pronunciation. Some empirical

0095-4470/$ - see front matter & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2012.01.001
492 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508
studies on acquisition of L2 sounds by learners with short length
of residence in the host country, or with non-naturalistic expo-
sure to the target language, provide some evidence of the
limitations of ‘‘nativelikeness’’ in L2 speech. For instance, Flege
(1987) investigated the production of the French vowels /u/ and
/y/ by four groups of speakers, a group of native French speakers
living in the United States and three groups of American English
speakers varying in L2 experience: a group with no French
experience, a group of American graduate students who had
spent one year in France, and a group of more advanced speakers
of French who taught this language at university level. The two
groups of English speakers with French experience produced
French /y/ with F2 values that fell within the range of values
measured in the native French productions. However, the three
groups of learners produced more ‘‘English-like’’ /u/s with F2
values that were higher than those of the native speakers of
French.
Bohn and Flege (1997) examined the production of the English
vowels /e/ and /æ/ by two groups of native German-speaking
adults differing in English language experience as measured by
length of residence in the United States (7.5 years vs. 0.5 years).
The authors provided acoustic data that suggested that /æ/ is a
new vowel for German speakers, since its location in a Bark-
difference space did not overlap with the acoustic space taken by
the neighboring German vowels /e/, /e7/, and /a/. The productions
of the experienced Germans and the native English speakers
showed two distinct vowel categories,1 one for /æ/ and one for
/e/. However, the productions by the inexperienced Germans
overlapped, suggesting that the speakers had merged the two
categories.
Relevant to the present study are the experiments reported in
Bongaerts (1999) and Birdsong (2007). In the first case, nativelike
pronunciation was investigated in two groups of Dutch learners of
English in a formal setting (Bongaerts, Planken, & Schils, 1995;
Bongaerts, Van Summeren, Planken, & Schils, 1997). One of these
groups was defined as ‘‘highly successful’’ by university EFL
experts. Learners were tested on English pronunciation by reading
aloud a series of sentences that contained sounds that were
judged to be potentially difficult for Dutch learners. It was found
that the pronunciation of some of these learners was consistently
judged by native English listeners to be nativelike, or authentic.
Similar findings were reported in a subsequent experiment with
Dutch learners of French (Bongaerts, 1999), indicating that
nativelikeness could be also generalizable to other L1–L2 pairings.
The author concluded that nativelike pronunciation in some of
these successful learners was possible thanks to the coexistence
of three factors: high motivation, massive exposure to the L2, and
intensive training in L2 perception and production skills.
In the Birdsong (2007) study, anglophone late learners of
French were tested on their ability to read aloud French words
and sentences in a nativelike fashion. At the segmental level,
acoustic measures of vowel duration and VOT revealed that some
learners produced vowels and consonants with values that fell
within the range of the native French controls. Likewise, global
pronunciation ratings by French judges showed that performance
by some of these learners met nativelike standards. Again, it was
concluded that those ‘‘exceptional learners’’ had some traits in
common with the learners in the Bongaerts studies, i.e., they were
highly motivated and had received phonetic training.
The Bongaerts and Birdsong studies provided some indication
that nativelikeness is not completely out of reach for some late L2
learners, who learned the target language mostly in a classroom
setting just like the participants in the present study.
1
The notion of phonetic category is widely discussed in Section 1.2.
1.1. Perception and production of English vowels by Catalan learners
Previous studies investigating acquisition of L2 speech sounds
have suggested that the inability to produce non-native sounds
accurately may be related to an inability to perceive these sounds
in a nativelike fashion (Flege, Bohn, & Jang, 1997; Flege, MacKay
et al., 1999; Rochet, 1995). Based on these findings, Cebrian (2006)
investigated the use of temporal and spectral cues in the perception
of the English vowels /i/, /ei/, /i/, and /e/ by two groups of Catalan
listeners who differed in starting AOL and learning setting, and a
control group of native Canadian listeners. The more experienced
Catalans had been exposed to English later in life (age 20–45), but
exposure had occurred mostly in the host country, since they had
been living in Canada for an average of 25 years. The less experienced
group was exposed to different varieties of English, since they were
university English majors living in Catalonia. In a three-alternative,
forced-choice task, listeners had to identify the vowel stimuli from a
two-dimensional continuum in which spectral and durational values
were varied in linear steps. Results indicated that native English
listeners and Catalan listeners showed different trends in the use
of perceptual cues to distinguish between the three English vowels.
The Catalan groups relied more on vowel duration than the native
English group, who made a greater use of spectral cues. No signifi-
cant differences were found between the two groups of Catalan
listeners, suggesting that experience did not influence their vowel
identification. These findings indicated that lengthy residence in the
host country might not have played a crucial role in how non-native
listeners categorize the vowels of a non-native language.
The production of the English vowels /i/, /i/, /ei/, and /e/ was also
examined in Cebrian (2007) by means of acoustic analysis and
identification judgments by native listeners. The same group of
Catalan speakers majoring in English produced the target vowels in
nonsense words. Results showed that the F1 and F2 frequencies of
/i/, /i/, /ei/, and /e/ fell within the range of the values obtained for
native English speakers, but overlap in the acoustic areas of the /i–i/
contrast suggested that the Catalan speakers had difficulties produ-
cing these two vowels differently. Further, the difference in dura-
tion between the tense and lax vowels of the /i–i/ and /ei–e/ pairs
produced by the Catalan speakers, indicated a nativelike use of this
acoustic parameter. The judgments of the Catalan speaker produc-
tions yielded similar scores for /i/ and /i/, leading to the assumption
that learners might succeed in producing accurate instances of /i/, a
‘‘new’’ sound, at the cost of occasionally producing /i/ inaccurately,
which was perceptually assimilated to its Catalan counterpart.
Fullana Rivera and MacKay (2002) investigated the production of
English words by a large group of Catalan EFL learners varying in
onset age of learning (ages 8–18) and amount of exposure to English
in terms of total hours of instruction. Native English judges rated the
learner productions for foreign accent. Overall, the productions were
rated as showing a moderate accent. A significant effect of experi-
ence was found, i.e., experienced learners received significantly
lower ratings than less experienced learners, but comparison with
a group of native English controls revealed poor performance of the
experienced learners relative to the native English speakers. In a
subsequent study (Fullana Rivera & MacKay, 2003), the authors
examined production of the English vowels /i/ and /i/ by means of
intelligibility scores. It was found that identification scores were
higher for /i/ than for /i/. No significant differences were found
among groups who varied in age of learning and experience with
the target language, but there was a trend toward more targetlike /i/
productions as exposure to English increased.
1.2. Theoretical frameworks of L2 speech acquisition: SLM and PAM
Most of the studies reviewed above were motivated by
two theoretical models that aim to account for the acquisition
 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508
of non-native speech sounds, specifically, perceptual learning and
accurate production of L2 sounds. The Speech Learning Model
(SLM) (Flege, 1995) makes the assumption that the ability to
perceive and produce L2 sounds is not lost in late adolescence or
adulthood. Late learners can perceive and produce the target
sounds with varying degrees of success, depending on the nature
and conditions of L2 exposure and use. Crucial to the SLM is the
relationship between the L1 and L2 sound systems, which has a
strong impact on how the L2 sounds are perceived and produced.
One of the postulates of the SLM is that the ‘‘L1 and L2 sound
systems exist in a common phonological space’’ (p. 238) and
hence influence each other. As argued in Flege et al. (2003), this
interaction involves two mechanisms, namely, category assimila-
tion and category dissimilation, with the understanding that an
L2 sound assimilates to an L1 sound when it is perceived as an
instance of the L1 sound, despite audible differences between the
two sounds.
The notion of perceptual assimilation/dissimilation leads to
another key issue of the SLM, namely, category formation. Flege
hypothesizes that a new phonetic category for an L2 sound can be
established if bilinguals can auditorily differentiate the L2 sound
from the closest L1 sound and from neighboring L2 sounds. The
notion of phonetic category implies the perceptual ability to (1)
‘‘identify a wide variety of phones as being the same, despite
auditorily detectable differences between them along dimensions
that are not phonetically relevant’’ and (2) ‘‘distinguish the
multiple exemplars of a category from realizations of other
categories, even in the face of noncriterial commonalities’’
(Flege, 1995, p. 244). The model predicts that category formation
and accurate L2 speech production are closely related, and that
many L2 production errors are caused by inaccurate discrimina-
tion of L1–L2 and L2–L2 sounds.
The Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) (Best, 1994) shares
with the SLM the postulate that discrimination of non-native
sounds can be predicted from the perceptual relatedness of non-
native categories to native categories. In the first versions of the
model, Best’s predictions of discrimination were applicable to
naı̈ve listeners/monolinguals who were not at all familiar with
the target language. In a recent extension of the model (PAM-L2),
Best and Tyler (2007) discuss similarities and differences between
both frameworks and extend the predictions of successful speech
perception to L2 learners.
The PAM-L2 distinguishes four distinct assimilation patterns of
L2 phonological categories to L1 phonological categories:
(1) Type 1 (‘‘two-category assimilation’’): The two sounds of an L2
contrast are perceived as equivalent to two L1 categories.
These contrasts are predicted to be discriminated with
relative ease.
(2) Type 2 (‘‘category-goodness assimilation’’): The two members of
the L2 contrast are heard as instances of the same L1 category,
but one of the members is perceived as being more similar
than the other; that is, they vary in category goodness. The
PAM-L2 predicts moderately good discrimination for these
contrasts and considers the possibility that learners establish
a new phonological category for the more ‘‘dissimilar’’ sound.
(3) Type 3 (‘‘single-category assimilation’’): The two sounds of the
L2 pair are assimilated to the same L1 category with equal
degrees of goodness. The PAM-L2 predicts poor discrimina-
tion for this contrast unless the sound contrast is lexically
productive, which in turn would facilitate perceptual
learning.
(4) Type 4 (‘‘uncategorized-uncategorized’’): The two sounds of a
given contrast are not clearly mapped onto a particular L1
category, but rather as in-between several L1 categories.
Successful discrimination will depend on the distance in
493
phonological space between the two sounds of the contrast.
The more distant they are, the easier to discriminate they
will be.
1.3. Cross-linguistic similarity of English vowels to Catalan vowels
As suggested by Strange (2007), similarity relationships
between L1 and L2 sounds can be established in two ways,
namely, acoustic/articulatory descriptions of sound inventories
and direct assessment by means of perceptual tests. A comparison
of English and Catalan vowels based on acoustic data from
published studies is problematic for various reasons: studies
exploring vowel variability in various American English dialects
do not always provide acoustic data (Clopper, Pisoni, & de Jong,
2005), while others provide acoustic data but limit the scope of
their study to certain regional varieties (Hagiwara, 1997;
Hillenbrand, Getty, Clark, & Wheeler, 1995; Strange et al., 2007).
Given these conditions, we will offer a simple comparison of
the Catalan and American English vowel inventories just for
informative purposes. The sources of this comparison are the
studies by Peterson and Barney (1952) for American English
(E) and Recasens and Espinosa (2006) for Catalan (C). The former
was selected because it provides acoustic data from various
regional dialects of the United States, thus being more represen-
tative of General American than other recent studies that provide
data from a single regional variety. The data from the Peterson
and Barney study reported below are from quite a broad sample
of 33 male speakers from different parts of the United States.
The vowels were elicited in the /h_d/ context. As for Catalan, the
vowels were produced by five male speakers in four different
consonantal contexts (labial, dentoalveolar, palatal and dark /l/ and
the trill /r/). To obtain the closest conditions for the crosslinguistic
acoustic comparison, we used the average formant frequencies in
a dentoalveolar context only. Further, in an attempt to neutralize
the effects of possible acoustic differences due to variation in
vocal tract length, the Catalan spectral values were normalized to
those of General American English using the same method as
previous studies on crosslinguistic comparison of vowels (Lee,
Guion, & Harada, 2006; Yang, 1996).2
As shown in Fig. 1, Eastern Catalan has a smaller vowel
inventory than General American English, with three front
vowels, /i/, /e/, and /e/, three back vowels, /L/, /o/, and /u/, and
two central vowels, /=/3 and /a/. On the basis of the acoustic
values in a dentoalveolar context obtained by Recasens and
Espinosa (2006), normalized to those in Peterson and Barney
(1952) for adult male speakers, it seems fair to say that C /i/
(F1¼330; F2 ¼2106) is intermediate between E /i/ (F1¼270;
F2¼ 2290) and E /i / (F1¼390; F2 ¼1990). The formant frequencies
of E /i / are close to those of C /e/ (F1¼453; F2 ¼1834). E /e/
(F1¼530; F2 ¼1840) is acoustically close to C /e/ (F1 ¼582;
F2¼ 1781). E /æ/ (F1 ¼660; F2¼1720) occupies an intermediate
position in the acoustic space between C /e/ and C /a/. The low
central and back English vowels E /e/ (F1¼640; F2 ¼1190) and
E />/ (F1 ¼730; F2¼1090) do not seem to have an equivalent in
Catalan because C /a/ (F1¼716; F2 ¼1420) is a central vowel and,
as such, it shows higher F2 frequencies than either E /e/ or E />/.
Regarding the back vowels, C /L/ (F1 ¼602; F2 ¼1102) is slightly
more centralized than E /L/ (F1¼ 570; F2¼ 840). Finally, C /u/
(F1¼389; F2¼1002) is intermediate between tense E /u/
(F1¼300; F2¼ 870) and lax E /R/ (F1¼440; F2 ¼1020).
2
A scale factor between the General American English (GAE) and the Catalan
(C) spectral data was calculated using the average F3 values of the open vowels by
k¼F3GAE/F3C.
3
/=/ only occurs in unstressed position.
494 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508
Fig. 1. Vowel charts for Eastern Catalan (top) and General American English
(bottom). The sources of the spectral data are Peterson and Barney (1952) and
Recasens and Espinosa (2006). The English vowels were produced by 33 male
speakers in an alveolar context; the Catalan vowels were produced by 5 male
speakers in a dento-alveolar context.
The perceptual similarity of English vowels to Catalan vowels
was first examined in Cebrian (2006). In this study, two groups of
Catalan listeners with and without English language experience
identified the English front vowels /i/, /i /, /ei / and /e/ as instances
of the four Catalan vowels /i/, /e/, /ei/ and /e/. The inexperienced
listeners could be considered ‘‘naı̈ve’’ in that they did not speak,
and had not been exposed to, English. In contrast, the experienced
group had regular exposure, having lived in Canada for an average
of 24 years. The stimuli, produced by two male Canadian English
speakers, consisted of /hVb/ syllables, from which the initial and
final consonants had been edited out. The English vowels /i/ and
/e/ were the most clearly assimilated to their Catalan counter-
parts /i/ and /e/, but /i / was not clearly mapped onto a single
Catalan category. No significant differences were found between
the inexperienced and experienced listeners, thus calling into
question the role of experience found in previous studies.
The perceptual relatedness of English vowels to Catalan
vowels was further investigated in Rallo Fabra (2005). Two groups
of listeners—a group of ‘‘naı̈ve’’ Eastern Catalan listeners with no
experience with English (inexperienced Catalans) and a group of
university students who were majoring in English (experienced
Catalans)—identified the English vowels /i/, /i /, /e/, /æ/, /e/, />/,
/L/, /R/, and /u/ and the Catalan vowels /i/, /e/, /e/, /a/, /L/, /o/, and
/u/ in terms of the seven Catalan vowel categories. Both groups of
listeners were familiar with the IPA phonetic symbols. Thus, the
IPA symbols for the Catalan vowels were used as response
categories along with an extra category labeled ‘‘nc’’, which stood
for ‘‘non-Catalan.’’ The stimuli were presented over headphones,
and listeners were instructed to click on the vowel symbol that
best fit the vowel they heard.
The stimuli used in the experiment were obtained from the
recordings of six native Eastern Catalan speakers (three male and
three female) and six native English speakers (one male and five
female) with a mean age of 21 years. The American speakers were
from different parts of the United States (Illinois, Idaho, Missouri
and Pennsylvania). They had studied Spanish as a foreign lan-
guage in the United States for an average of five years and had
been living in Barcelona for about six months.
The assimilation patterns of the target English vowels to the
native Catalan vowels are tallied in Table 1. Differences between
the experienced and inexperienced groups were found. These
differences involved two aspects: percentage of times that the
‘‘non-Catalan’’ label was chosen to classify the English vowels and
the choice of the modal L1 category to classify a given L2 vowel.
Overall, the experienced group used the ‘‘non-Catalan’’ label more
often than the inexperienced group, possibly indicating that in
some cases many listeners heard some English vowels as ‘‘differ-
ent’’ from any Catalan vowel. More importantly, however, differ-
ences in the perceptual similarity between English and Catalan
vowels were found for /i / and /æ/. The inexperienced Catalans
perceived E /i / as similar to C /e/. In contrast, the experienced
Catalans showed a preference for C /i/ over C /e/. As for /æ/,
experienced Catalans heard this vowel as both C /a/ and ‘‘non-
Catalan’’ whereas inexperienced Catalans identified it as C /a/ and
C /e/, suggesting that /æ/ had no clear equivalent in Catalan.
When compared to Cebrian (2006), the results of perceptual
similarity between English and Catalan vowels obtained in Rallo
Fabra (2005) reveal an important discrepancy regarding the
classification of English /i /. We found differences in how experi-
ence with English affected the perceptual mapping of this vowel.
The inexperienced listeners perceived E /i / as similar to C /e/,
replicating assimilation patterns found by Cebrian (2006) for both
experienced and inexperienced listeners. In contrast, the experi-
enced learners in our study classified this vowel both as
C /i/ and also as a ‘‘non-Catalan’’ vowel. Likewise, another recent
study (Cebrian, 2009) showed that E /i / was most frequently
assimilated to C /i/, both by the Catalan inexperienced and
experienced listeners. Various factors may have accounted for
the disparity of these results. We speculate that listeners’ lan-
guage experience, the different consonantal contexts in which the
vowels were elicited, the dialects of English used for the stimuli
and the response categories may all have interacted here. The
vowel stimuli in Cebrian (2006) were produced by Canadian
English speakers in a bilabial context, whereas Rallo Fabra
(2005) used vowel stimuli produced by American speakers from
different dialectal areas in an alveolar context. There is evidence
in the literature that both language experience and consonantal
context affect cross-language speech perception. For instance,
Bohn and Steinlen (2003) found that Danish speakers with
English language experience classified English /i / as instances of
Danish /e/ in glottal and alveolar contexts but as /i/ in velar
context. Levy (2009a) reported that assimilation patterns of
French vowels to English vowels were more consistent in a
bilabial context than in an alveolar context; further, experienced
learners were found to be more consistent than inexperienced
listeners in their mapping of French vowels onto English vowels.
In an AXB discrimination experiment, Levy and Strange (2008)
noted that inexperienced English listeners confused French /i–y/
more often in an alveolar context than in a bilabial context, but
that experienced listeners showed no context effect. Finally, the
response categories used in Rallo Fabra (2005) included an option
labelled ‘non-Catalan’, which listeners were instructed to select if
the vowel they heard was not similar to any Catalan vowel. This
response option was not included in Cebrian (2006). On the basis
 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508 495

Table 1
Percent identification of American English vowels by 15 naı̈ve Catalan listeners (inexperienced) and 37 Catalan EFL learners (experienced). Bold figures indicate the modal
identification vowel. Responses selected 3% or less are omitted.
Adapted from Rallo Fabra, 2005.

Vowel stimuli Response category (inexperienced)

a e e i o L u nc

i 99.2
i 19.2 62.5 15.8 2.5
e 11.7 50.8 25 10.8
æ 45 35 5.8 11.7
e 57.5 5 5.8 11.7 16.7
> 78.3 9.2 10
L 55.8 3.3 23.3 15.8
R 5 11.7 15.8 6.7 30.8 30
u 95

Vowel stimuli Response category (experienced)

a e e i o L u nc

i 95.9
i 12.2 11.5 39.5 35.8
e 13.9 60.5 7.8 16.9
æ 57.8 6.8 34.5
e 47 11.1 37.5
> 64.2 14.5 20.3
L 40.5 3.5 33.1 22.3
R 9.5 34.9 47.5
u 81.1 18.2

of the evidence reported in all the above studies, it seems that
assimilation patterns of L2 vowels to L1 vowels are highly
sensitive to experimental conditions such as language experience
of the listener groups, consonantal context and dialect variation of
the vowel stimuli.
1.4. Perception/production relationship
The assumption that perception and production do align in
adult L2 acquisition has been one of the most controversial issues
in L2 research. Various authors agree that the relation between
these two abilities is a complex one (Llisterri, 1995; Wode, 1999).
For instance, Bohn and Flege (1997) argue that ‘‘in the early stages
of L2 speech learning, perception may lead productiony. Inex-
perienced L2 learners may differentiate a new vowel contrast
perceptually, without differentiating this contrast in production’’
(p. 69). They add that the two abilities do not ‘‘progress in
parallel’’ and that further experience with the target language
will have positive effects on production, but perception will be
highly resistant to malleability. Similarly, Strange (1995) shares
the view that experienced and inexperienced learners represent
two distinct groups as far as the perception /production align-
ment is concerned. She claims that production errors of inexper-
ienced learners can be predicted from perceptual errors, but both
skills might be uncorrelated for experienced speakers.
Flege (1999) challenges the Critical Period Hypothesis tenet that
segmental production and perception no longer align after the
passing of a critical period for language acquisition. He argues
that ‘‘perception and production may not be brought into perfect
alignment, as in L1 speech acquisition, but modest correlations
will exist between L2 segmental production and perception for
highly experienced speakers of an L2’’ (p. 1273). Flege’s claims are
grounded on two empirical studies examining the relationship
between perception and production data. In one of these studies,
Flege, Bohn et al. (1997) investigated the perception and produc-
tion of four English vowels, /i/, /i /, /e/, and /æ/ in 90 speakers
from different L1 backgrounds (German, Spanish, Mandarin and
Korean). Regression analyses of the perception and production
data showed that non-native speaker accuracy in producing the
English vowels was determined by accuracy in perceiving the
same vowels. Similarly, Flege, MacKay et al. (1999) found sig-
nificant correlations between the intelligibility scores and the
vowel discrimination scores, supporting the hypothesis that the
ability to produce accurate instances of the target vowels was
related to a parallel ability to discriminate these vowels
accurately.
The relationship between the perception and the production of
the English vowels /i/, /i /, /ei /, and /e/ by Catalan learners was also
explored in Cebrian (2002). Although the r values for the correla-
tions were statistically significant, they were quite modest in size.
In most cases (six out of eight), r values ranged from 0.33 to 0.44
for a sample size of 29. Only in two cases did correlations reach
higher values of 0.61 or 0.73. Cebrian attributed the low correla-
tions to methodological factors, as it had been pointed out earlier
by Flege (1999).4
1.5. The present study
The two experiments reported in this paper were designed
with four major goals in mind. The aim of the perception
experiments was to test whether some of the predictions and
hypotheses of the PAM and the SLM could be applied to EFL
learners who were learning the target language in a non-natur-
alistic setting, specifically, three groups of Catalan EFL learners
varying in English proficiency. As reviewed earlier in this section,
the PAM-L2 claims that discrimination of L2 contrasts can be
predicted from the perceptual relatedness of L2 vowels to L1
vowels. In light of the PAM framework, we examined the
discrimination of four English vowel contrasts on the basis of
the crosslinguistic similarity results found in a previous study
4
Correlations might not be the most appropriate method to compare
perception and production data.
496 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508
(Rallo Fabra, 2005). Predictions of potential difficulty in discrimi-
nating English vowel pairs by Catalan learners of English were
made on the basis of the four types of assimilation patterns
proposed in the PAM-L2: two-category assimilation, category-good-
ness assimilation, single-category assimilation and uncategorized.
A key tenet of Flege’s SLM is that L2 learners may eventually
establish phonetic categories for certain L2 sounds if they can
discern the phonetic differences between the L2 sound and the
closest L1 sound, as well as the differences between the L2 sound
and other neighboring sounds in the acoustic space. The model
also hypothesizes that category formation enhances accurate
production in the L2. Thus, our second goal was to test the
hypothesis that some L2 learners could establish new perceptual
categories for certain English vowels. This was done by means of a
perceptual test that examined discrimination of six Catalan–
English vowel contrasts and four English vowel contrasts.
The third goal was to investigate whether the Catalan learners
could produce English vowels accurately and to what extent
language proficiency would influence their accuracy in the pro-
duction of these vowels. Vowel accuracy was assessed in two
ways, acoustically, and by native English listener judgments. It
was hypothesized that the proficient learners would produce
vowels that were acoustically closer to those produced by native
English speakers than the vowels produced by mid-proficient and
low-proficient learners.
Finally, the fourth goal involved the relationship between
perceptual and production abilities. The SLM is grounded on the
hypothesis that production errors of L2 sounds have a perceptual
basis. It should be noted here that these predictions are based on
findings from populations that had extensive exposure to the L2
in a naturalistic setting. We are not certain to what extent they
can be applied to foreign language acquisition in a formal class-
room setting.
2. Experiment 1: Categorial discrimination test
As reported earlier, Eastern Catalan has a smaller vowel
inventory than General American English. Further, many of the
English vowels do not have an equivalent in Catalan or have
different degrees of similarity to Catalan vowels. It can then be
hypothesized that certain pairings of L1–L2 and L2–L2 vowels will
be potentially difficult to discriminate by Catalan learners. In this
experiment, the same groups of Catalan EFL learners from a
previous study examining crosslinguistic similarity of vowels
(Rallo Fabra, 2005) were tested on their ability to discriminate
Catalan–English and English–English vowel contrasts. Two
research questions derived from the PAM-L2 and the SLM were
addressed:
(1) Can ease of discrimination be predicted from the perceptual
assimilation of L2 sounds to L1 sounds?
The PAM-L2 calls for research testing predictions of success or
failure to discriminate non-native contrasts by listeners with
and without L2 experience. A recent study (Levy, 2009b)
tested the PAM-L2’s predictions by comparing discrimination
of French vowels by English listeners with differing language
experience to perceptual assimilation data by the same
listeners (Levy, 2009a). Following Levy (2009b), ease or
difficulty in non-native vowel discrimination by experienced
learners was predicted on the basis of results from a cross-
linguistic similarity study by the same learners (Rallo Fabra,
2005).
Assimilation patterns were determined qualitatively consid-
ering the percentage of trials in which an English vowel was
assimilated to a particular Catalan vowel (Table 2). For
Table 2
Assimilation patterns of English vowels to Catalan vowels based on PAM-L2
(Best & Tyler, 2007).
L2 vowel % assimilation Perceptual assimilation
contrast to L1 pattern (PAM-L2)
/i–i / /i/-/i/ (96%) ‘‘Category-goodness’’
assimilation (type 2)
/i /-/i/ (39.5%)
/u–R/ /u/-/u/ (81.1%) ‘‘Category-goodness’’
assimilation (type 2)
/R/-/u/ (34.9%)
/>–e/ />/-/a/ (64%) ‘‘Single-category’’
assimilation (type 3)
/e/-/a/ (47%)
/e–æ/ /e/-/e/ (60%) ‘‘Two-category
assimilation’’ (type 1)
/æ/-/a/ (58%)
instance, the tense vowels in the /i–i / and /u–R/ contrasts
were quite consistently heard as C /i/ and C /u/, respectively,
as opposed to the lax vowels, whose percentage of assimila-
tion to C /i/ and C /u/ was quite low. We judged that these two
pairs fell within the ‘‘category goodness’’ type, since one
member of each pair was more consistently classified as /i/
or /u/ than the other. Based on the PAM-L2, we predicted
moderately good discrimination for these two contrasts. The
contrast />–e/ was a case of ‘‘single category’’ assimilation
since both />/ and /e/ were perceived as instances of Catalan
/a/. As predicted in the PAM-L2, Catalan learners are not as
likely to discriminate this contrast successfully. Finally, /e/
and /æ/ were heard as similar to C /e/ and C /a/, respectively,
and, as such, it was predicted that the /e–æ/ contrast would
be discriminated with relative ease.
(2) Can late L2 learners establish phonetic categories for some L2
sounds?
One of the predictions of the SLM is that adults can establish
long-term memory representations or ‘‘phonetic categories’’
for some L2 sounds that are perceptually distant from
the closest L1 sound. The model also hypothesizes that the
chances of category formation are inversely related to the
perceived phonetic distance between the target sound and
its L1 equivalent. On these grounds, we predicted that more
proficient learners might establish new perceptual categories
for English /i / and /R/, as these were perceived by some
listeners to be deviant from any Catalan vowel. The establish-
ment of a new phonetic category for an L2 sound will thus be
determined by learners’ ability to successfully discriminate
contrasts made of an L2 sound and the closest L1 sound.
2.1. Method
2.1.1. Stimuli
The same stimuli as in Rallo Fabra (2005) were used. They
consisted of sVt syllables that contained one of the seven Catalan
vowels, /i/, /e/, /e/, /a/, /L/, /o/, and /u/, and one of the English
target vowels, /i/, /i /, /e/, /æ/, /e/, />/, /R/, and /u/. The words were
recorded on a CP-300 Marantz tape-recorder and subsequently
digitized with a waveform editor at 22.00 kHz sampling rate and
16-bit resolution. The sVt words were then edited to eliminate
the final stop and normalized for peak intensity. This was done to
prevent listeners from basing their perceptual judgments on the
crosslinguistic difference between the dentoalveolar released
production of C /t/ and the alveolar unreleased production of
 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508
E /t/ in final position, but it had the limitation of creating open
syllables for the lax vowels /i /, /e/, /æ/, /e/, and /R/.
The stimuli were combined in triads to examine the discrimi-
nation of eleven vowel contrasts in two separate perception tests.
For the first experiment, seven Catalan–English (C–E) contrasts
including a Catalan vowel and an English vowel were tested /a–æ/,
/a–>/, /e–e/, /a–e/, /i–i/, /i–i /, and /u–u/. The C–E contrasts were
paired following the outcomes of the perceptual similarity study
(Rallo Fabra, 2005). For instance, the English vowels />/, /e/, and
/æ/ were mapped onto C /a/, so three of the C–E contrasts
consisted of one of these three vowels and the closest Catalan
vowel /a/. English /L/ was not included in any of the contrasts as
many speakers of American English do not distinguish between
/>/ and /L/. The C–E contrast /u–R/ was not included, either,
because /R/ was mostly heard as non-Catalan, so we judged that
the /u–u/ contrast was probably more difficult to discriminate
than /u–R/. In the second experiment, four English–English (E–E)
contrasts />–e/, /e–æ/, /i–i / and /u–R/ were tested. The reason
why the />–e/ and /æ–e/ contrasts were chosen and not other
possible combinations such as />–æ/ or /æ–e/ is simply because
the former was potentially more difficult to discriminate than
the latter on the basis of the acoustic distance between the two
vowels within the pair.5
The three stimuli in all trials were produced by different
speakers, which forced the listener to ignore within-category
phonetic differences. Each vowel contrast was tested in 16 trials:
eight ‘‘different trials’’ and eight ‘‘catch trials’’. ‘‘Different trials’’
always had an odd item, that is, one of the stimuli belonged to a
different vowel category and it could occur in any of the three
positions. ‘‘Catch trials’’ were made of three physically different
stimuli of the same vowel category, so there was no odd item. The
total number of trials in each test was 112 for the C–E contrasts
and 64 for the E–E contrasts.
2.1.2. Listeners
The same group of Catalan learners as in Rallo Fabra
(2005)6 were tested individually in a quiet room. All participants
were undergraduate students majoring in English (mean
age¼22). At the time of testing they had just finished a two-term
American English Phonology course at their home university in
Tarragona (Spain), a course that included an in-depth study of the
English sound system, phonetic transcription, and intensive
pronunciation practice. Listeners had benefited from a similar
quality and amount of exposure to English in terms of formal
instruction and length of stay in an English-speaking country, but
they exhibited different levels of proficiency in English. For this
reason, they were divided into three groups according to their
language proficiency: proficient (n¼10), mid-proficient (n¼12),
and low-proficient (n¼ 12). The criterion for inclusion in one of
the three groups was the grade they obtained in the pronuncia-
tion component of the American English phonology course, which
consisted of a series of self-recorded pronunciation exercises that
5
Evidence from various studies that explore vowel variability across dialects
in American English (e.g., Clopper et al., 2005, pp. 1668–1669) shows that, in
speech production, /æ/ often merges with /e/ but not with />/ or /e/. Similarly, />/
merges with /e/ but not with /æ/. Likewise, other studies that examine VISC
(vowel-inherent spectral change) patterns (see Hillenbrand, 2011, for a review),
show that formant frequencies measured from the beginning and end of vowels
/æ/ and /e/ share similar VISC patterns (from high to low frequencies). This is true
of Canadian English (Nearey & Assmann, 1986) and Midwest American English
(Hillenbrand et al., 1995). The vowels />/ and /e/ also share similar VISC patterns
(from low to high frequencies) which are different from those of /æ/ and /e/ (high
to low).
6 8
The number of participants in the perceptual assimilation study (Rallo Fabra,
2005) was 37. Three of these participants did not take the categorial discrimina-
tion test.
497
students had to provide throughout the term. These exercises
tackled a wide variety of aspects of American English pronuncia-
tion, including vowels, consonants, stress, rhythm and intonation,
with a special emphasis on those areas that are known to induce
transfer problems for native speakers of Spanish and/or Catalan.
The instructor, an experienced Catalan phonetician who had lived
in the United States for an extended period of time and spoke
English on a daily basis, was the only one responsible for the
assessment of the recordings.7 The mean grade obtained by each
group, on a 0–10 scale, was 8.72 (range 7.9–9.8) for the proficient
learners, 6.66 (range 6–7.5) for the mid-proficient learners, and
4.25 (range 2.5–5.5) for the low-proficient learners.
2.1.3. Procedure
Listener discrimination of the target vowel contrasts was
assessed using a categorial discrimination test (CDT) as proposed
in Flege (2003). The CDT modifies the classical AXB categorial
discrimination task to prevent listeners from discriminating
between instances of the same category. The inclusion of ‘‘catch
trials,’’ which consist of realizations of a single category spoken by
three different speakers ‘‘encourages subjects to respond only to
phonetically relevant differences, not merely to auditorily detect-
able ones’’ (p. 23). This test has been used by Flege and colleagues
in various perceptual studies to assess category formation in L2
speech learning (Flege & MacKay, 2004; Flege, MacKay et al.,
1999; Guion, Flege, Akahane-Yamada, & Pruitt, 2000; Tsukada
et al., 2005).
The test was administered to individual listeners in a single
session divided in two separate blocks. In the first block, partici-
pants listened to the seven C–E contrasts while in the second
block they listened to the four E–E contrasts. There was a 5-min
break between the two blocks of the test. Four buttons appeared
on the computer screen with the numbers 1, 2 and 3 and a button
labelled ‘‘no.’’ Listeners heard three stimuli in each trial and they
were instructed to click on the button that corresponded to the
‘‘odd item out’’ if they heard one vowel that was different from
the other two. This odd item could be any of the three stimuli or
none of them. If they heard all three stimuli as being ‘‘the same,’’
they were to click the ‘‘no’’ button. The inter-trial interval was set
at 2.8 s, and the inter-stimulus interval was set at 1.3 s.
2.2. Results
To test whether discrimination varied as a function of group
(proficient, mid-proficient, low-proficient), contrast (/a–æ/, /a–>/,
/e–e/, /a–e/, /i–i/, /i–i /, and /u–u/ for the C–E contrasts and />–e/,
/e–æ/, /i–i /, and /u–R/ for the E–E contrasts), or both group and
contrast, two separate repeated measures two-way ANOVAs
were performed, one for the C–E contrasts and one for the
E–E contrasts. In both cases, the dependent variable was the A0
values (Snodgrass, Levy-Berger, & Haydon, 1985),8 a measure of
7
Inter-rater reliability analysis could not be performed because the record-
ings were returned to the students after they finished the course. It was not
possible to present these recordings to other raters for assessment and thus
strengthen the participants’ group division made on the basis on one rater only.
Instead, we performed intra-rater reliability analysis based on the pronunciation
grades obtained by 417 students who had taken the English Phonology course in
five successive academic years (the two academic years in which the present
study was conducted, the previous two years and the following year). Following
Bruton, Conway, and Holgate (2000) we measured this one rater’s reliability by
means of a one-way ANOVA examining the single effect of time. The ANOVA
yielded no significant effects in the pronunciation grades of the students’ grades in
five academic years (F(4, 411) ¼1.161; p ¼ 3.28), indicating the rater’s consistency
assessing students’ pronunciation over time.
The function used to calculate the A0 scores depended on the proportion
of hits and false alarms for each contrast. If the proportion of hits (H) equaled
the proportion of false alarms (FAl), then A0 ¼0.5þ ((H FAl)  (1þ H  FAl))/
498 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508

Table 3
Mean A0 values for the seven C–E contrasts tested in experiment 1. The F-values are for separate one-way ANOVAs examining the contrast  group interaction. (n) indicates
significance at the 0.01 level. Alpha level for the pairwise comparisons was set at 0.05.

Group 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 F Tukey’s HSD

/a–e/ /a–>/ /e–e/ /a–æ/ /i–i/ /i–i / /u–u/

Proficient 0.425 0.452 0.361 0.274 0.638 0.802 0.650 (6,74) ¼ 17.6n 6,741,2,3,4; 5 41,3,4
Mid-prof. 0.352 0.534 0.452 0.302 0.537 0.799 0.625 (6,75) ¼ 11.1n 641,2,3,4,5; 7 41,4; 544
Low-prof. 0.511 0.581 0.382 0.410 0.526 0.684 0.457 (6,62) ¼ 1.77

The length of the error bars suggests high variability across

individuals in all three groups. A general inspection of the graphs
reveals practically no between-group differences in performance
for the contrasts /a–æ/, /a–>/, /e–e/ and /a–e/, but moderate
between-group differences for the contrasts /i–i/, /i–i / and /u–u/.
Fig. 2b also suggests that discrimination involving the vowels /i/,
/i /, and /u/ was somewhat more accurate as a function of language
proficiency, that is, overall, the proficient and mid-proficient
groups showed moderately higher sensitivity than the low-
proficient group.
The A0 scores for the Catalan–English contrasts were submitted
to a repeated measures ANOVA with contrast as the within-
subject factor and group as the between-subjects factor. The main
effect of contrast was significant (F(6, 21) ¼20.3; p o0.01). How-
ever, the ANOVA yielded no statistically significant effect of group
(F(2, 26)¼ 0.008; p ¼0.99), but a significant two-way interaction
(F(12, 42) ¼3.09; p o0.01). Additional one-way ANOVAs (see
Table 3) revealed that the main effect of contrast was significant
for the proficient (F (6, 74) ¼17.6; p o0.01) and mid-proficient
learners (F(6, 75) ¼11.1; p o0.01) but not for the low-proficient
learners (F(6, 62) ¼1.77; p ¼0.12).
Pairwise comparisons with Tukey’s HSD tests showed that the
proficient learners made fewer errors in the discrimination of the
/i–i / and /u–u/ contrasts (A0 values between 0.6 and 0.8) than in
discrimination of the /a–e/, /a–>/, /e–e/ and /a–æ/ contrasts (A0
values between 0.2 and 0.4). The /i–i/ contrast was also signifi-
cantly more accurately discriminated (A0 ¼0.63) than /a–e/, /e–e/,
or /a–æ/. There was no significant difference between the three
‘‘more accurately discriminated’’ contrasts and the four ‘‘poorly
discriminated’’ contrasts.
The mid-proficient learners showed significantly higher sensi-
tivity to the /i–i / C–E contrast (A0 ¼0.79) relative to the /a–e/,
/a–>/, /e–e/, /a–æ/, and /i–i/ contrasts, whose A0 values ranged
from 0.35 to 0.53, indicating a lack of sensitivity to these five
Fig. 2. A0 scores obtained by the three groups of Catalan learners differing in
English proficiency, for the seven C–E contrasts tested.
contrasts. They also showed higher sensitivity to the /u–u/ C–E
contrast in comparison with /a–e/ and /a–æ/. Finally, the A0 scores
for /i–i/ and /a–æ/ also differed significantly from one another.

sensitivity scored by each subject in discriminating each of the

vowel contrasts. The independent variables or factors were vowel
contrast (within-subject) and group (between-subject).
2.2.1. Catalan–English contrasts
The average A0 values for the seven C–E contrasts tested are
shown in Table 3 and plotted in Fig. 2a and b. The error-bar plots
reveal that listeners showed no sensitivity in discriminating pairs
involving English /e/, /æ/, /e/, or />/ in contrast with Catalan /e/
and /a/ and that they showed moderately good sensitivity to the
English vowels /i/, /i /, and /u/ in contrast with Catalan /i/ and /u/.
(footnote continued)
((4  H)  (1  FAl). However, if FAl exceeded H, then A0 ¼ 0.5  ((FAl–
H)  (1þ FAl  H))/((4  FAl)  (1 H)). A0 scores of 0.5 or below indicated a lack
of phonetic sensitivity, values of 0.6 to 1.00, indicated that listeners were sensitive
to the contrasts.
2.2.2. English–English contrasts
The average A0 scores for the E–E contrasts are presented in
Table 4 and plotted in Fig. 3. The error bars in Fig. 3 indicate high
variability across groups and contrasts, especially among the low-
proficient learners. A repeated measures ANOVA with contrast
(4) as a within-subject factor and group (3) as a between-subjects
factor yielded a significant simple effect of contrast (F(3, 29) ¼
4.85; p o0.01), but no significant effect of group (F(2, 31)¼0.87;
p¼0.42) and no significant interaction (F(6, 58)¼1.37; p ¼0.24).
Pairwise comparisons based on the estimated marginal means
revealed that /i–i / and /u–R/ were more accurately discriminated
(average A0 ¼0.59 and 0.58, respectively) than />–e/ and /e–æ/,
po0.05 (average A0 ¼0.45 and 0.42, respectively). However there
was no significant difference between the two ‘‘more accurately
discriminated’’ contrasts and the two ‘‘poorly-discriminated’’
contrasts (p 40.05).
 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508
Table 4
Mean A0 values for the four E–E contrasts tested in the CDT. The F-values are from a repeated measures ANOVA examining the main effects of contrast and group and the
contrast  group interaction. (n) indicates significance at the 0.01 level. Alpha level for the pairwise comparisons was set at 0.05.
Group 1 />–e/ 2 /e–æ/ 3 /i–i / 4 /u–R/
Prof. 0.559 0.452 0.618 0.618
Mid-prof. 0.470 0.410 0.548 0.555
Low-prof. 0.333 0.449 0.608 0.587
Overall discrimination of the E–E and C–E vowel contrasts was
considerably poorer compared to the discrimination scores found
in previous studies with L2 learners from different L1 back-
grounds (Flege & MacKay, 2004; Flege, MacKay et al., 1999;
Guion et al., 2000). It is likely that the higher sensitivity showed
by listeners in the previous literature is related to amount of
exposure to the target language. The participants in our study had
limited exposure to English and hardly ever used the target
language outside the classroom, quite a different scenario from
the Italian speakers in two of the studies cited earlier, who had
lived in Canada for many years and, consequently, had long-term
exposure to the L2.
The A0 scores for both the E–E and the C–E contrasts were
found to vary considerably. Individuals in each of the three groups
showed varying degrees of sensitivity to the same contrast. This
variability also increased as a function of group. Proficiency in
English influenced discrimination of the C–E contrasts, but it did
not influence discrimination of the E–E contrasts. The significant
contrast by group interaction found for the C–E contrasts indicated
that the proficient and mid-proficient learners could discriminate
two contrasts relatively well—/i–i / and /u–u /—and that the
proficient learners also showed modest sensitivity to the /i–i/
contrast. However, the low-proficient group discriminated all C–E
contrasts quite poorly. As for the four E–E contrasts, neither the
main effect of group, nor the contrast by group interaction was
significant. This suggests that the three groups of learners
discriminated these contrasts in a similar fashion and that they
all showed little sensitivity to the English vowel pairs.
2.3. Discussion
The first research question addressed in this experiment was
whether ease of discrimination could be predicted from the
perceptual relatedness of the target sounds to the existing native
categories, as suggested by the PAM-L2. This model predicts poor
discrimination when two L2 sounds assimilate to one L1 category
(‘‘single category’’ type). As predicted, overall discrimination of
the E–E contrasts was poor for /e–>/ because both vowels were
assimilated to a single Catalan category, i.e., /a/. The PAM-L2
further predicts moderate to good discrimination in cases when
two L2 sounds are mapped onto one L1 sound but differ in
‘‘category goodness.’’ As predicted, learners showed more sensi-
tivity to the /u–R/ and /i–i / contrasts because in both cases the
vowels were mapped onto a single Catalan vowel /u/ and /i/,
respectively, but one instance of each pair was more consistently
assimilated to its Catalan counterpart than the other. Finally, the
/e–æ/ pair fails to meet the PAM-L2’s predictions, as a case of
‘‘two-category assimilation’’, learners should have discriminated
the vowels with relative ease, but this was not the case. The
English vowels /e/ and /æ/ were mostly heard as instances of C /e/
and C /a/, respectively. However, Catalan learners frequently
identified E /e/ in terms of C /a/ and E /æ/ was heard as C /e/,
albeit in a small number of the trials. Further, listeners classified
both vowels as ‘non-Catalan’, suggesting that the perceptual
distance between the two vowels of the pair is very small, thus
causing confusability among non-native listeners. Further, two
499
F effect F effect F group  contrast Pairwise comparisons
of contrast of group interaction (effect of contrast)
(3,29) ¼4.85n (2,31)¼0.87 (6,58)¼1.37 3, 4 4 1, 2
(3,29) ¼4.85n (2,31)¼0.87 (6,58)¼1.37 3, 4 4 1, 2
(3,29) ¼4.85n (2,31)¼0.87 (6,58)¼1.37 3, 4 4 1, 2
Fig. 3. A0 scores obtained by the three groups of Catalan learners differing in
English proficiency, for the four E–E contrasts.
more English vowels /e/ and />/ were also perceived as close to C
/a/, a pattern of L2–L1 assimilation (three L2 vowels assimilated
to the same L1 vowel) that is not accounted for by the PAM-L2,
and which might have contributed to the difficulty in discrimi-
nating the /e–æ/ contrast.
The second research question was concerned with one of the
hypotheses of the SLM (Flege, 1995), which states that adult
learners will eventually establish phonetic categories for some L2
sounds if they can discern the phonetic differences between the
L2 sound and the closest L1 sound. It could be argued that testing
vowel discrimination using stimuli that were elicited in an
alveolar context only is insufficient to support or reject this
hypothesis because it is uncertain whether the perceptual pat-
terns found so far will extend to other consonantal contexts.
However, the fact that the highest A0 scores in the CDT were
obtained for the /i-i / and /u-R/ pairs seems to indicate that
learners could distinguish between the two vowels of each pair.
In addition, learners could also discriminate between C /i/ and
E /i /, but only the proficient learners could modestly differentiate
between C /i/ and E /i/. On the basis of the evidence provided so
far, it seems reasonable to assume that the mid-proficient and
proficient learners could have established new phonetic cate-
gories for E /i / and E /R/, at least in an alveolar context, but it is
unlikely that they could have established new phonetic categories
for E /i/ and E /u/, which were perceptually merged with their
Catalan counterparts.
The SLM also posits that a learner’s L1 and L2 phones exist in a
common phonological space and interact with one another. The
Catalan learners could not perceive the differences between the
Catalan and English vowels in most contrasts. The learners showed
high sensitivity to only one C–E contrast, i.e., C /i/–E /i /. They
showed marginal sensitivity to three C–E contrasts—C /a/–E />/, C
/i /–E /i/, and C /u/–E /u/—and they showed no sensitivity to the
other three vowel pairs, C /a/–E /æ/, C /a/–E /e/, and C /e/–E /e/.
These results suggest that in the learner’s internal representations,
500 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508
E />/, E /e/, and E /æ/ share the same perceptual space as C /a/;
further, E /i/, E /e/, and E /u/ are not separate categories from their
Catalan counterparts C /i/, C /e/, and C /u/, respectively. In other
words, learners probably do not switch between two separate
perceptual systems; instead, they reorganize their existing per-
ceptual vowel space to fit both the L1 and the L2 vowels.
Language proficiency did not seem to influence learners’
discrimination abilities. All three groups showed similar patterns
of perceptual sensitivity to the target vowels. Overall, A0 scores
were poor in comparison with previous studies (Flege, MacKay
et al., 1999; Guion et al., 2000). We could argue that this is due to
the fact that that there were no differences in starting age or
amount of exposure to the target language among the three
groups of learners. In all groups, exposure to English did not
occur prior to ten or eleven years of age, and it was often
restricted to formal instruction by both native and non-native
speakers. In contrast, the participants in the studies mentioned
above had a considerable amount of exposure to the target
language, so this probably contributed to the development of a
higher sensitivity for discriminating differences between L1 and
L2 sounds. Taken together, our findings suggest that formal
language instruction may produce only small perceptual changes.
Consequently, malleability of the speech perception system
seems to be severely limited when exposure to the L2 occurs at
adolescence and, particularly, in non-naturalistic contexts.
3. Experiment 2: Vowel production
This experiment examined production of the English vowels
by three groups of Catalan learners of English varying in profi-
ciency in the target language, and a group of native American
English speakers who served as controls. The following research
questions were addressed:
(3) Do Catalan learners produce the English vowels authentically
and to what extent does production accuracy vary as a function
of proficiency in English?
Prior work with Catalan interlanguage provides limited and
contradictory evidence on English vowel production by Cat-
alan learners. For instance, Cebrian (2007) reported that
experienced Catalans produced /i/, /i /, /ei /, and /e/ with
spectral values that fall within the range of native English
speakers, but the /i–i / pair showed overlap in the acoustic
space. Both vowels were identified as intended by native
listeners at similar accuracy levels. In contrast, a study with
less experienced Catalan EFL learners (Fullana Rivera and
MacKay, 2003) found that /i/ received higher intelligibility
scores than /i /. To our knowledge, no other published studies
have investigated production of other vowels by Catalan
learners. Consequently, in light of the evidence provided so
far, we predicted that the Catalan learners in the present
study would produce some of the target vowels accurately.
Specifically, the lax vowels /i / and /R/ were more likely to
receive higher ratings since they were discriminated with
relative ease from their tense counterparts /i/ and /u/, and
also from their closest Catalan vowels /i/ and /u/. Further, we
predicted that English proficiency would influence levels of
accuracy, with better performance for the proficient group
and poorer performance among the mid-proficient and low-
proficient learners.
(4) Are perception and production data correlated?
The SLM claims that accurate production in the L2 can only be
guaranteed if learners develop perceptual targets that moni-
tor the sensorimotor learning of L2 sounds (Flege, 1995). It
has been suggested that the relationship between these two
abilities is a complex one and that they do not progress in
parallel (Llisterri, 1995; Wode, 1999). Other authors (Bohn &
Flege, 1997; Strange, 1995) argue that in the early stages of L2
acquisition perception leads production, but as learners gain
experience with the target language, speech production
improves while perceptual abilities are highly resistant to
change. We are uncertain to what extent these claims can be
extended to EFL learning, but assuming that they are, we can
predict that low-proficient learners are more likely to exhibit
a correlation of these two abilities than mid-proficient or
proficient learners.
3.1. Method
3.1.1. Participants
The same group of Catalan learners who participated in the
perception experiment produced the target words in a different
testing session. Due to the fact that female speakers outnumbered
male speakers, only the speech productions of the 27 female
speakers were used in this experiment. As with the perception
test, the Catalan learners were divided into three groups accord-
ing to their language proficiency: proficient (n ¼10), mid-profi-
cient (n ¼9), and low-proficient (n ¼8). The five native English
speakers (NE) were visiting students at the University of Barce-
lona (mean age ¼21). They came from four different regional
areas in the United States (Mid-Atlantic, North, South and West),
but none of them had a strong regional accent as judged by the
second author. There was a strong reason for the geographical
diversity in the control group. We reasoned that the learning
conditions for the Catalan learners in terms of nature and amount
of exposure to English were not ideal. Unlike L2 learners in a
naturalistic setting, who are typically exposed to a single English
dialect on a regular basis, the Catalan learners’ exposure was
restricted to the instructional setting, and was often highly
diversified in terms of the English variety spoken by the lecturers.
Given this L2 multidialectal setting, it was unlikely that learners
had a single English dialect as their target.
3.1.2. Word elicitation
Each talker produced a corpus of 33 words containing tokens
of each of the eight English vowel categories tested, namely, /i/, /i/,
/e/, /æ/, />/, /e/, /R/ and /u/ (see Table 5). The words were selected
from The Oxford Acoustic Database (Pickering & Rosner, 1993),
which provides word lists for various languages classified by
sounds. Monosyllabic words in the context of voiceless stops or
fricatives were chosen when possible to facilitate sound segmen-
tation. In order to test the learners’ ability to produce accurate
instances of the intended vowels, the target words were elicited
in a variety of consonant environments. A task in which subjects
are required to produce the target sounds in a single consonantal
context would probably be too easy for subjects who had received
some phonetic training that involved listening and repeating
minimal word pairs.
Participants were recorded individually in a sound-proof booth
using a Marantz tape recorder, Model CP-300 and a Shure (model
Table 5
Speech materials used in the production experiment.
/i/ /e/ /æ/ /u/
/i / />/ /e/ /R/
heap hip bed cap rob rub hood boot
eve fish dead dad sob shut hook moon
each itch head had knob nun full fool
eel ill men man cop cup look
less lass
 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508
SM58) microphone. The task was a single-word elicitation in
which the experimenter visually presented the randomized target
words, with no carrier phrases, using flashcards. Speakers were
instructed to read the words that appeared orthographically on
the flashcards and to produce them using a flat intonation. Four
extra words, which were not included in the reported data, were
added at the beginning of the randomized list to familiarize
speakers with the task. Speakers were allowed to self-correct,
that is, on the rare occasion that a speaker read the word
incorrectly, she could repeat it once.
3.1.3. Accuracy measurement
Accuracy of the speech productions by the Catalan learners
and the native English group was measured in two ways: by
acoustic measurements and by native listener judgments in a
forced-choice vowel identification experiment with goodness
ratings. A total of 1056 words (32 speakers  8 target vowels  4
or 5 words) were digitized with Kay Elemetrics CSL 5500 at a
10000 Hz sampling rate. The spectral measurements were
extracted automatically using the auto-correlation method of
linear predicting coding (LPC) analysis option. The pitch detection
frame was set at 5 ms and the zero-crossing limit at 50 crossings.
The onset and offset of each vowel segment were identified by
visual inspection of wide-band spectrograms and time domain
waveforms. The average F1 and F2 values from the five central
frames were taken from the steady-state portion of the vowel
segment at 5 ms steps. Duration measurements for the tense/lax
vowel pairs /i–i / and /u–R/ were obtained manually by visual
inspection of waveform and time-synchronized wideband spec-
trographic displays using Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2008). For
CVC words, vowel onsets were defined as the onset of voicing
following the frication noise for fricatives, the release burst for /b/
and as the onset of low intensity formants for /m/. Offset for both
CVC and VC words was defined as the beginning of closure-
interval /frication noise when the following consonant was a stop
or a fricative and as a low intensity formant if a nasal followed.
A total of 352 time measurements were obtained (11 words  32
speakers).9
A subset of 16 words was further assessed for accuracy by
native English listeners. Specifically, the words heap, each, hip,
itch, head, dead, had and dad were selected to assess productions
of the front vowels /i/, /i /, /e/, and /æ/ and the words shut, cup, cop,
sob, hood, look, boot, and moon were chosen to assess accuracy of
the central and back vowels /e/, />/, /R/ and /u/. A total of 512
words (16 words  32 speakers) were normalized for peak inten-
sity and arranged in four blocks for auditory evaluation by four
native English listeners. All listeners were native American
English speakers from the Study Abroad Program hosted by the
University of the Balearic Islands. Their mean age was 21. They
came from different universities in the Midwest region of the
United States. They were tested individually in a quiet room and
were paid for their participation.
The 16 target words were presented via dual driver satellite
loudspeakers using a laptop computer in four separate testing
sessions, two sessions for the front vowel subset and another two
sessions for the central and back vowel subset. The tests were run
with the MFC application of the Praat software, which allows
presentation of sound files in counterbalanced order and auto-
matically collects listeners’ responses. Each testing session lasted
about 10 min. In most cases, listeners completed two sessions in
9
The words eel, ill, full and fool were not included in the analysis because of
the on-glide that often appears between the vowel and the [l] in these sequences.
Of these 32 speakers, 27 were Catalan learners and five were native English
speakers.
501
one day and had at least a one-hour break between them. In the
first session, they received some short training (five trials) to
familiarize themselves with the task. Participants were told that
they would hear an unspecified proportion of tokens spoken by
native and non-native speakers of English. (Native speakers
produced 78 tokens, and non-native speakers produced 503
tokens.) They were instructed to perform two kinds of judgments.
First, participants were to identify the vowel within the word they
heard, selecting one of the keywords presented on the screen.
Immediately after that, they had to rate the intended vowel for
goodness using a five-point scale (1¼poor instance; 5¼good
instance). They had the option to listen to the stimuli word again
if necessary. Following Piske et al. (2002), we limited the number
of response keywords in order for listeners not to feel over-
whelmed; thus, we selected the keywords heed, hid, head, had, hot,
and hut to identify the front vowels, and had, head, hut, hot, hood,
and who’d to identify the central and back vowels.
3.2. Results
3.2.1. Spectral measurements
Eight separate one-way ANOVAs examined the effect of group
on the formant frequency values of the vowels produced by the
four groups of speakers. The F-values for the front vowels shown
in Table 6 indicate that the simple effect of group was significant
at the 0.01 alpha level for the F1 and F2 values of the /i/ tokens.
Tukey’s HSD post hoc tests further revealed that the first formant
of vowels produced by the mid-proficient group was significantly
higher than the F1 values of tokens produced by the NE. The post
hoc tests also showed that the second formant values of the /i/
tokens produced by the native English speakers were significantly
higher than those produced by the mid-proficient and low-
proficient learners. The proficient learners did not differ signifi-
cantly from the NE, indicating that language proficiency positively
influenced production of the high front tense vowel.
Again, the main effect of group for /i / was significant at the
0.01 level for F2 but not for F1. The three groups of learners
produced /i / tokens with significantly higher F2 values than those
of the native English speakers. For /e/, F was significant at the 0.01
alpha level and Tukey’s HSD tests showed that this effect was due
to a marginal difference between the F1 frequencies of the tokens
produced by the low-proficient and mid-proficient groups. Apart
from this, none of the three groups differed significantly in their
productions from the NE group. This is also true of the formant
values of the /æ/-tokens, which did not yield any significant
differences between the native and the non-native productions.
As for the back and central vowels, the ANOVAs revealed a
significant main effect of group on first-formant frequencies for
vowels />/ and /R/, a marginally significant effect for /e/ and a
nonsignificant effect for /u/. Tukey’s HSD (a ¼0.05) revealed that
for />/, the first formants for the proficient and low-proficient
groups were significantly lower than for the native English
speakers. The F1 values for the mid-proficient learners did not
differ significantly from the native English speaker group. The
productions of the low central vowel /e/ were within the range of
native English standards, as shown by the absence of significant
differences in formant values. All three groups of learners had
trouble producing the high back pair /u–R/. Significant differences
were found in F1 between the /R/ tokens of the native English
speakers and those of the learners, regardless of their language
proficiency level. Finally, learners produced more peripheral
instances of /u/ as judged by the lower F2 values relative to the
NE speakers, who produced more centralized /u/ tokens as
defined by the higher F2 values.
The mean F1 and F2 formant values for the eight vowels tested
were plotted in three separate two-dimensional acoustic spaces
502 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508

Table 6
Mean frequency values and standard deviations (in parentheses) for the vowels tested in the production task. The F-values are for separate one-way ANOVAs examining
the simple effect of group. (n) and (nn) indicate significance at the 0.01 and 0.001 levels, respectively. Alpha level for the pairwise comparisons was set at 0.05.

1 2 3 4 F Tukey’s HSD
Low-prof. Mid-prof. Prof. NE

Vowel
/i/ F1 447 (83) 472 (61) 436 (70) 391 (49) (3,86) ¼ 4.12n 2 44
F2 2549 (186) 2593 (150) 2682 (164) 2801 (253) (3,86) ¼ 6.53nn 4 41, 2

/i / F1 493 (84) 546 (87) 557 (89) 583 (91) (3,90) ¼ 3.85
F2 2390 (195) 2361 (205) 2378 (188) 2171 (286) (3,90) ¼ 4.00n 1, 2, 344

/e/ F1 710 (130) 653 (123) 738 (89) 698 (74) (3,157)¼ 5.09n 1 o2
F2 2067 (169) 2188 (151) 2183 (204) 2205 (232) (3,157)¼ 2.99

/æ/ F1 794 (145) 831 (109) 782 (100) 862 (150) (3,155)¼ 2.87
F2 2003 (261) 2003 (270) 2083 (243) 1921 (309) (3,155)¼ 2.11

/>/ F1 751 (148) 828 (90) 788 (113) 905 (80) (3,124)¼ 8.36nn 4 41,3; 241
F2 1478 (225) 1419 (185) 1386 (217) 1346 (123) (3,124)¼ 2.24

/e/ F1 711 (140) 804 (122) 728 (109) 785 (110) (3,122)¼ 4.26n 2 41,3
F2 1620 (235) 1548 (207) 1605 (215) 1684 (241) (3,122)¼ 1.56

/R/ F1 498 (69) 549 (72) 527 (69) 655 (96) (3,90) ¼ 12.99nn 4 41,2,3,
F2 1180 (269) 1243 (228) 1395 (283) 1337 (217) (3,90) ¼ 3.43n 1 o3

/u/ F1 498 (71) 482 (101) 461 (98) 435 (56) (3,58) ¼ 1.16
F2 1047 (187) 1031 (291) 1062 (252) 1354 (274) (3,58) ¼ 3.81n 4 41,2,3,

for each group of speakers (Fig. 4). Eight additional one-way
ANOVAs and a posteriori contrasts (Tukey’s post hoc tests)
examining the effect of vowel were performed to determine
whether the F1 and F2 dimensions had different weight across
the four groups. The results showed significant effects for the two
acoustic dimensions in all groups.10
The post hoc tests revealed three distinct patterns: the mid-
proficient and low-proficient learners showed the same trend, but
the proficient learners and the NE group showed two separate
trends. Comparison of the mean formant frequencies for the
vowels produced by the mid-proficient and low-proficient groups
yielded three subsets of data for the F1 dimension and six subsets
of data for the F2 dimension. The three separate F1 subsets
included the high vowels /i/, /i /, /u/, and /R/, the mid-vowels /e/
and /e/, and the low vowels /e/, />/, and /æ/. The F2 dimension
included six subsets of data, /u, R/; />, e/; /æ/; /e/; /i /; and /i/.
The F1 data for the proficient group yielded four separate
subsets: /i, u/; /R, i /; /e, e/; /e, æ, >/. As with the other two groups
of learners, six subsets were identified for the F2 data: /u/; /R, >/;
/e/; /æ, e/; /i /; and /i/. Finally, examination of the data obtained
for the NE group revealed a different pattern. Unlike the three
groups of learners, the F1 values of the vowel tokens produced by
these speakers represent six separate subsets of data— /i, u/; /R, i /
; /e, R/; /e, e/ /e, æ/ and /æ, >/—in contrast to the five subsets for
the F2 values: /u, R, >/; /e/; /æ, e/; /e, i /; and /i/.
These data, along with the three vowel charts, showed that
learners, due to the influence of the Catalan vowel system,
exhibited a tendency to narrow the F1 dimension of the acoustic
vowel space relative to the native English group, who showed six
distinct degrees of vowel height in terms of F1 values. This
suggests that learners gave more weight to the F2 dimension
when distinguishing vowel categories. Unlike learners, native
speaker relative weighting of the F1 and F2 dimensions was more
balanced across vowels. This crosslinguistic difference had a
10
NE: F1 F(7, 152)¼ 62.4; p o 0.001, F2 F(7, 152)¼ 99.2; p o 0.001; proficient
learners: F1 F(7, 316)¼ 95.3; po 0.001, F2 F(7, 316) ¼240.2; p o 0.001; mid-
proficient learners: F1 F(7, 278)¼ 90.5; po 0.001; F2 F(7, 278) ¼210; po 0.001
and low-proficient learners: F1 F(7, 277)¼ 48.91; po 0.001, F2 F(7, 277) ¼227.1;
p o0.001.
negative effect on vowel confusability by the non-native groups:
the acoustic distances between the two vowels in the pairs /i–i /,
/u–R/, /e–æ/, and /e–>/ narrowed, causing a high degree of
overlap between the two members of each pair. However, it
should be noted that there was a trend for vowel spaces to spread
as proficiency in English increased, so that the acoustic distances
between neighboring vowels became wider, especially in the
pairs /i–i /, /æ–e/, and /u–R/.
3.2.2. Duration measurements for the tense–lax pairs
Four separate one-way ANOVAS examined the effect of group
on vowel duration for the tense/lax vowel pairs /i–i / and /u–R/.
Significant differences in vowel duration were found for the tense
vowel /i/ (F(3, 88)¼3.79, p ¼0.013), but no significant differences
were found for /i / (F(3, 91)¼1.22; p ¼0.304) /u/ (F(3, 56) ¼2.19;
p¼0.098) or /R/ (F(3, 91) ¼1.96; p¼0.125). Pair-wise comparisons
for the /i/ durations indicated that the mid-proficient and low-
proficient learners differed significantly from the proficient lear-
ners and native English speakers. Table 7 shows the average
vowel duration and duration ratios for the four high vowels. In all
cases except for /i/, vowel duration becomes closer to nativelike
values as a function of proficiency in English. In the case of /i/, the
proficient learners show a clear trend towards more nativelike
vowel durations, relative to the low-proficient and mid-proficient
groups. These results indicate that a considerable number of
learners have great difficulty differentiating /i/ from /i / in terms
of vowel length and contrast with previous studies that explore
duration of these vowels as produced by Catalan learners
(Cebrian, 2007; Mora & Fullana, 2007). They found that Catalan
learners relied on duration in the production of /i/ and /i /
regardless of L2 experience. We speculate that the different
methodologies used in the elicitation tasks in both these studies
might not make them comparable with the present study. In the
Cebrian study learners produced the target vowels in a repetition
and vowel insertion task, while Mora & Fullana used a delayed
sentence repetition task. These methodologies probably allow for
a better control of speaking rate, which is known to affect spectral
and temporal parameters of vowels (Gay, 1968; Lindblom, 1963;
Miller, 1981). The present study was not primarily designed to
 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508 503

Table 7
Mean vowel durations and duration ratios in ms. of the tense–lax vowel pairs /i–i /
and /u–R/. SDs are in parentheses.

/i/ /i / Ratio /u/ /R/ Ratio

/i–i / /u–R/

Low-proficient 120 (36) 101 (28) 1.18 149 (40) 105 (30) 1.41
Mid-proficient 124 (36) 100 (22) 1.24 168 (48) 118 (31) 1.42
Proficient 141 (47) 109 (25) 1.29 173 (42) 122 (32) 1.41
Native English 165 (63) 113 (27) 1.46 196 (42) 130 (40) 1.50

3.2.3. Native English Listener judgments

Fig. 4. Vowel chart plotting the mean values of the English vowels /i/, /i /, /e/, /æ/,
/e/, />/, /R/ and /u/ produced by the three groups of Catalan learners varying in
English proficiency and a control group of native English speakers.
Reliability analyses were performed to assess inter-rater
agreement of the vowel identification and goodness ratings. The
intraclass correlation coefficients based on the forced-choice
responses by four native English listeners were 0.96 for the front
vowels and 0.91 for the back vowels, indicating a high level of
inter-rater consistency. However, listeners were less consistent
when rating the intended vowels for goodness: the correlation
coefficients were 0.61 for the front vowel ratings and 0.58 for the
back vowel ratings.
The percentage of times that a target vowel was correctly
identified as an instance of the intended vowel, along with the
corresponding goodness ratings, is shown in Table 8. These
percentages are based on the forced-choice judgments by four
native English listeners.11 The total percentage of ‘‘hits,’’ defined
as the percentage of times that a target vowel was identified as
intended, averaged across learners and vowels, was submitted to
a two-way ANOVA. Both the single effects of vowel and group
were significant (F(7, 2004)¼9.9; p o0.001 for vowel and F(3,
2008)¼33.2; po0.001 for group), indicating that the percentage
of vowels that were heard as intended by native English judges
varied significantly across vowels and groups. Additional one-way
ANOVAs examining the effect of group yielded significant effects
for /i/ (F(3, 244) ¼6.4, po0.001), /i / (F(3, 249) ¼5.1, p ¼0.002), /e/
(F(3, 247) ¼7.9, po0.001), /æ/ (F(3, 244)¼ 5.4, p o0.001), /e/ (F(3,
252)¼ 2.7, p o0.05), />/ (F(3, 248) ¼14.1, po0.001), and /R/ (F(3,
248)¼ 5.2, p o0.001), but not for /u/ (F(3, 248) ¼2.2, po0.082).
Pair-wise comparisons with Tukey’s post-hoc tests showed that,
for /i /, /e/ and />/, percent identification by NE judges was
significantly higher for the tokens produced by the NE speakers
than for the tokens produced by any of the three groups of
learners. For the vowels /i/ and /æ/, the tokens produced by the
NE speakers were significantly better identified than the tokens
produced by the mid-proficient and the low-proficient learners.
The proficient learners produced instances of /i/ and /æ/ that were
heard as intended and within the range of NE speakers. For the
vowel /e/, the mid-proficient and proficient learners did not
significantly differ from NE speakers and, for /R/, the mid-
proficient learners did not differ from NE speakers either.
As for the goodness ratings, the main effect of group was also
significant F (3, 2008)¼69.9; po0.001, the pair-wise comparisons
showed that the three groups of learners received significantly
lower goodness ratings than the native English group. In turn,

investigate how learners implemented durational cues in the
tense–lax English vowel pairs and, consequently, speaking rate
was not controlled. Further, the syllabic structure in which the
vowels were placed also differed. The Catalan learners in the
Cebrian and Mora & Fullana studies produced the vowels in CVC
syllables, in the present study vowels appeared in VC as well as
CVC syllables.
11
Originally, six native listeners were used but three of them failed to
consistently identify the NE productions as intended. These three listeners had
reported having lived in other dialect areas before they moved to the Midwest.
The decision was made to reject the judgments by these three listeners, which had
not reached 80% identification percentage of the NE data averaged across vowels,
and obtain judgments from an additional listener. Still, instances of vowel /u/ by
the NE group were identified less consistently than other vowels. Inspection of the
identification percentages across listeners, suggested that one listener system-
atically identified instances of the word moon as close to hood rather than who’d.
504 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508

Table 8
Percent identification and goodness ratings of eight English vowels produced by three groups of Catalan learners differing in English proficiency, and a group of native
English speakers. Percentages indicate the average number of times a given vowel was identified as intended by four native English listeners, who also rated the speech
productions for goodness on a one-to-five scale (1¼poor instance; 5¼ good instance). SDs for the goodness ratings are given in parentheses. Responses selected 3% of the
times or less have been omitted.

Low-proficient learners Mid-proficient learners Proficient learners Mean Catalan learners Native English

/i/ /i/43/i /55 /i/43/i /57 /i/62/i /35 /i/49% /i/81/i /11/e/8
3.38 (1.37) 3.58 (1.39) 3.53 (1.35) 4.22 (1.26)

/i / /i /72/i/25 /i /71/i/25 /i /71/i/26 /i /71% /i /100

3.41 (1.26) 3.95 (1.11) 3.75 (1.22) 4.55 (0.63)

/e/ /e/61/æ/27/i /12 /e/49/æ/48 /e/50/æ/45/i /5 /e/53% /e/87/æ/8

3.11 (1.18) 3.37 (1.32) 3.29 (1.18) 4.58 (0.87)

/æ/ /æ/67/e/27/i /5 /æ/76/e/21 /æ/83/e/17 /æ/75% /æ/100

3.22 (1.14) 3.26 (1.27) 3.52 (1.33) 4.89 (0.31)

/e/ /e/48/æ/20/>/12/e/9/R/8 /e/62/æ/20/>/18 /e/64/æ/12/>/9 /e/58% /e/83/æ/7/>/2

3.28 (1.06) 3.74 (0.97) /R/12 3.83 (0.95)
3.60 (1.05)

/>/ />/32/e/57/æ/7 />/65/e/33 />/52/e/39/æ/8 />/49% />/92/e/7

3.25 (0.87) 3.61 (0.98) 3.53 (1.13) 4.48 (0.78)

/R/ /R/65/u/28/e/5 /R/74/u/24 /R/62/u/17/e/6 /R/67% /R/90/u/10

3,59 (1.08) 3.86 (0.92) 3.54 (1.08) 4.83 (0.44)

/u/ /u/52/R/43 /u/67/R/33 /u/67/R/30 /u/62% /u/75/R/25

3.77 (1.04) 4.03 (0.87) 4.19 (0.87) 4.73 (0.55)

the low-proficient learners received significantly lower ratings
than the proficient or mid-proficient learners.
The identification percentages across groups and vowels sug-
gest that, on average, learners produced the English vowels /i /, /æ/,
/R/, and /u/ relatively well, with identification percentages of 75%
for /æ/, 71% for /i /, 67% for /R/, and 62% for /u/. However, learners
were less successful at producing good instances of the vowels /e/,
/e/, />/, and /i/. The vowel /i/ was often misidentified as /i / and the
number of misidentifications was higher in the vowels produced
by the mid-proficient and low-proficient groups. The vowel /e/
was inaccurately produced, with most errors being confusions
with /æ/ as judged by the native English listeners. The low back
vowel />/ yielded the lowest identification percentages, although
accuracy was higher in the mid-proficient and proficient learners.
Listeners heard this vowel as instances of English /e/, indicating
that Catalan learners had great difficulty differentiating />/
from /e/.
The vowel identification results partially parallel the results of
acoustic measurements in terms of vowel formant frequencies.
In some cases, lower identification percentages can be accounted
for by significant spectral differences between learners and NE
speakers. For instance, />/ was identified as intended in 49% of
the cases; this is reflected in the spectral measurements in that the
F1 values of the tokens produced by two groups of learners were
significantly lower than the NE speaker values. Similarly, /i/ was
identified as intended quite rarely—only 49% of the time; the
spectral measurements showed highly significant differences
between NE speakers and low-proficient and mid-proficient lear-
ners in terms of F2 values. A vowel that was consistently identified
as intended with a reasonable degree of success (75%), namely /æ/,
exhibited no significant spectral differences between learners and
NE speakers. In one case, /u/, a moderate identification is indicated
by smaller spectral differences (at the 0.01 level) between learners
and NE speakers. Finally, there are two cases in which spectral
measurements do not parallel identification percentages: the
learners’ /e /-tokens were identified as intended in 53% of the
cases only, whereas these tokens were not found to differ spect-
rally from the NE tokens. Similarly, the learners’ /R /-tokens were
quite consistently identified (67%) even though spectrally they had
significantly lower F1 values than the NEs. The mismatch between
these two measurements could be an artifact of the speech
materials measured in both experiments. We must remember
that the acoustic measurements were taken from a larger number
of words than were used in the auditory evaluation experiment.
Further, the acoustic measurements were based on formant values
obtained at the midpoint of the steady-state portion of the vowel
and thus other spectral data such as vowel transitions, VISC or
upper formant values were not considered.
There was a trend toward better identification as a function of
language proficiency in the learners’ production of five target
vowels— /i/, /æ/, /e/, />/, and /u /—but no differences in language
proficiency were found for /i / and /R/. This finding might suggest
that the lax vowels present less difficulty for Catalan learners than
their tense counterparts. For /i/, correct percent identification was
considerably higher among the proficient learners relative to the
low-proficient or mid-proficient learners, whose productions of /i/
were more often heard as /i /. Similarly, the percentage of times
that /u/ was heard as /R/ was lower among the mid-proficient and
proficient learners than among the low-proficient learners. Mid-
proficient and proficient learners also showed better performance
for the mid-vowels /æ/, /e/, />/, relative to the low-proficient
learners. Comparison of the percent identification of /e/ and />/
suggests that the low-proficient group had great difficulty produ-
cing these two vowels since their productions of />/ were mostly
heard as /e/ by the native English listeners.
3.2.4. Perception/ production relationship
In this section the research question addressed was whether a
relationship existed between the results obtained in the categor-
ial discrimination test (Experiment 1) and the vowel production
task (Experiment 2). Following a previous study by Jia, Strange,
Wu, Collado, and Guan (2006), the perception /production align-
ment was examined at the individual and group levels. Bivariate
correlations were computed for the 27 Catalan learners between
the mean A0 scores obtained by each subject in the perception test
and the mean identification percentage obtained in the word
elicitation task. No significant correlation was found when the
data were pooled as a whole (r ¼0.262; n ¼27; p ¼0.18); however,
when the data were pooled separately for each group, they
 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508
Table 9
Difficulty ranking of the bidirectional production error rate and A0 scores
(discrimination) for the four E–E vowel contrasts.
Production Difficulty Perception Difficulty
bidirectional rank A0 scores rank
error
/i–i / 49 þ 25¼ 75 1 0.621 4
/e–æ/ 40 þ21 ¼ 61 2 0.426 1
/>–e/ 43 þ 13¼ 56 4 0.559 3 spectral differences in comparison with the NE values and were
/u–R/ 23 þ 35¼ 58 3 0.557 2 identified as intended with relative success. It is hard to deter-
exhibited three distinct trends. Production and perception data
were not correlated for the low-proficient learners (r ¼  0.206;
n ¼8; p ¼0.62) or for the proficient learners (r ¼0.255; n ¼10;
p ¼0.47) but a significant correlation was found for the mid-
proficient learners (r ¼0.755; n ¼9; p ¼0.01).
The perception /production alignment at the group level was
computed correlating the overall A0 score for each E–E vowel pair
with the mean bidirectional error found in production. This
variable was obtained summing up the confusion rates of the
two vowels in each pair; that is, the percentage of times that each
intended vowel was heard as its counterpart (see Table 9). The
correlation between these two variables did not reach signifi-
cance, either (r ¼0.465; n¼4; p ¼0.53), causing a mismatch of the
perception and production difficulty rankings.
3.3. Discussion
In this experiment one of the research questions addressed was
whether Catalan learners of English could produce some English
vowels authentically and whether this varied as a function of
language proficiency. We found that the total percentage of times
that a vowel was correctly identified by native English listeners
was significantly lower among the Catalan learners relative to the
native English speakers, suggesting that language proficiency did
not positively influence nativelike vowel production.
The spectral measurements showed that the vowels produced by
the three groups of learners showed a tendency to centralization
relative to the vowels produced by the NE. Overall, this trend
diminished as a function of language proficiency, which means that
the acoustic distances between the vowels that define the extremes
of the acoustic space—‘‘point vowels’’ /i/, /u/, and /a/ (Maddieson,
1984)—were larger for the proficient group compared to the low-
proficient group. The less-expanded vowel inventories of the Catalan
learners have immediate consequences for vowel intelligibility, in
that they increase potential confusions between neighboring vowel
categories. This was quite obvious in the productions of the /i–i/ and
/u–R/ pairs by the low-proficient learners. The dispersion of /i/ and /u/
in the acoustic space relative to /i/ and /R/ caused overlap between
the two vowels of each contrast. This was also found in studies
examining vowel production by the hearing-impaired (Angelocci,
Kopp, & Holbrook, 1991; McGarr & Whitehead, 1992), which reported
cases of centralized vowel productions by deaf speakers relative to
their normal-hearing peers. Researchers attributed this fact to a lack
of precision in the articulatory gestures due to impaired auditory
feedback. Similar findings were reported in a study exploring
acquisition of the Spanish vowel system by English learners
(Reeder, 1998, 1999). In this study, speakers showed just the opposite
trend from the Catalan learners in the present study: They had to
adjust from a large L1 vowel inventory to the five-vowel system of
Spanish. Reeder also reported significant improvement in vowel
attempts for higher level learners as compared with the lower level
groups.
Considering both spectral measurements and NE judgments, it
could be stated that the Catalan learners produced instances of
505
the vowel /æ/ that were close to nativelike; that is, they were
heard as intelligible instances of the intended target vowel and,
acoustically, they had spectral values that did not significantly
differ from the NE speaker values. However, learners were less
successful at pronouncing good instances of the vowels /i/ and />/,
since these differed significantly from NE spectral values and
were not consistently identified as intended. The production of /i /
and /u/ was moderately good in that both vowels showed small
mine production success for /e/, /e/, and /R/, given the fact that
the spectral results did not parallel identification results or vice
versa. In the first two cases, both vowels were heard as intended
in 53% and 58% of the instances, respectively, but neither of them
was spectrally distant from NE /e/ and /e/. The vowel /R/ showed
just the opposite trend: It was quite consistently identified by the
NE judges but, conversely, it was spectrally quite distant from NE
/R/.
Comparison with a previous study on Catalan interlanguage
(Cebrian, 2007) reveals that there exists a partial discrepancy in
relation to the production of the vowels /i/ and /i/, which were
identified by native listeners at similar identification percentages,
73% and 71% respectively, suggesting that Catalan learners could
produce both vowels at comparatively similar levels of accuracy. In
the present study, we found that only the proficient learners could
produce both vowels at comparable levels of consistency (62% for
/i/ and 71% for /i /). When the performance of the low-proficient
and mid-proficient groups was considered, we found that /i/ was
more consistently heard as intended than /i/. The finding that /i/
could present less difficulty than its tense counterpart for less
proficient learners is in line with Cebrian’s speculation that a
gradual realization of the spectral characteristics of the lax vowel
may go in hand with the deterioration of its tense counterpart.
As far as production of /e/ is concerned, our findings differ
substantially from Cebrian’s. He found that, /e/ was quite con-
sistently identified by NE listeners but this was not the case of the
present study. Learners produced instances of /e/ that were often
heard as /æ/. Conversely, learners encountered less difficulties
with /æ/, which was more consistently identified as intended by
NE listeners. Production of these two vowels seems to follow a
similar trend as the /i/–/i / contrast. As learners gain in L2
proficiency, they gradually produce a new L2 vowel sound
authentically but this achievement comes at the cost of deterior-
ating production of a neighboring L2 sound. Similar findings
involving production of English /e/ and /æ/ by Portuguese speak-
ers are reported in Major (1987).
It is likely that the type of elicitation task and the different
contexts in which the target vowels were elicited could have
accounted for the difficulty shown by the less-proficient learners
in producing the tense vowel. In Cebrian’s study the target vowels
were elicited in the hVb context, whereas in our study, the vowels
were elicited in VC in addition to CVC positions. The possibility
exists that low-proficient and mid-proficient learners encounter
fewer difficulties when the target vowel occurs in CVC syllable
types, than when it occurs in VC syllables. Onsetless syllables are
known to be acquired at a later stage in first language acquisition
(Levelt, Schiller, & Levelt, 1999/2000). We also speculate that an
elicitation task in which learners are asked to utter the vowel in a
single consonantal context yields better results than a task in
which learners are asked to produce the vowels in a variety of
unpredictable contexts, as was the case of our study. However,
the data obtained so far are insufficient to give support to this
hypothesis.
The group differences just reported align with acoustic mea-
surements of vowel formants and vowel duration. For instance,
the proficient learners produced /i/ tokens with vowel durations
506 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508
that did not differ significantly from native English values. Similarly,
the three vowel charts plotted in Fig. 4 further attest that the
spectral distance between pairs of neighboring vowels such as /i–i/
and /e–>/ increased with language proficiency. Taken together, the
acoustic measurements and the native listener judgments suggest
that there might exist some limitations to the number of vowels EFL
learners can produce in a nativelike fashion when their L1 vowel
inventory has a smaller number of vowel phonemes than the target
language. Late EFL learners may learn to produce relatively good
instances of some new and old L2 vowels at the cost of mispro-
nouncing other acoustically close vowels.
4. Summary and conclusions
This study examined perception and production of American
English vowels by three groups of Catalan learners in a non-
naturalistic setting. In Experiment 1, Catalan learners varying in
English proficiency were tested on their ability to discriminate
seven C–E and four E–E vowel pairs. Overall, they showed
moderately good sensitivity to the two English /i–i / and /u–R/
pairs but no sensitivity to /e–æ/ and /e–>/. These outcomes were
interpreted in light of the PAM-L2 (Best & Tyler, 2007) and, except
in one case, they met the model’s predictions of discriminability.
Learners had great difficulty discriminating most C–E vowel pairs.
With the exception of the C /i/–E /i / pair, which was easy to
discriminate, learners showed only marginal sensitivity to the
C /a/–E />/, C /i/–E /i/ and C /u/–E /u/ pairs and no sensitivity to
the C /a /–E /æ/, C /a/–E /e/, and C /e/–E /e/ pairs. These findings
suggest that learners had difficulties differentiating between the
target English vowels /e/, /æ/, /e/, />/, /i/ and /u/ and their Catalan
counterparts /e/, /a/, /i/, and /u/.
In Experiment 2, the same group of learners that participated
in the perceptual test produced instances of eight English vowels
/i/, /i /, /e/, /æ/, /e/, />/, /R/, and /u/ in a variety of consonantal
contexts. Accuracy was assessed by means of acoustic measure-
ments and native English listener judgments. Significant differ-
ences in formant frequency between non-native and native
English speakers were found for the vowels /i/, />/, and /R/.
Native and non-native instances of the vowels /i / and /u/ also
differed marginally in spectral terms. Vowel duration was also
measured in the tokens that contained one of the vowels in the
tense–lax pairs /i–i / and /u–R/. Significant differences between
the mid-proficient and low-proficient learners on the one hand,
and native English speakers on the other hand, were found for the
/i/ tokens only. However, the proficient learners produced /i/
tokens with vowel durations that did not differ significantly from
native English speaker values.
A subset of the speech materials was further assessed by
native English listeners who judged the words as instances of
the intended vowel and rated them for goodness of accuracy. The
native English judgments indicated that, overall, most learners
had less difficulty with the lax vowel /i / than with its tense
counterpart /i/, but this did not extend to the other tense–lax pair
/u–R/. Of the three low vowels, /æ/ was the most frequently
identified as intended by NE listeners, followed by /e/, but this did
not hold true of /e/ and />/, which are located next to /æ/ and /e/,
respectively, in the acoustic space. As for the goodness ratings,
our results are consistent with prior findings by Munro and
Derwing (1999) which explored foreign accent and L2 speech
intelligibility. They found that foreign language speech can be
intelligible yet strongly accented. We reported that only the
proficient learners produced tokens that were rated as signifi-
cantly more accurate than the tokens produced by the other two
learner groups, albeit less accurate than tokens produced by the
NE speakers. It is reasonable to conclude, then, that late EFL
learners might be able to produce some target vowels as intended
but that these would be perceived as less accurate by native
English listeners.
The lack of an overall significant correlation between the
perception and production data at both the individual and group
levels does not parallel prior studies exploring perception of L2
sounds (Bohn & Flege, 1997; Cebrian, 2002; Flege, Bohn et al.,
1997; Flege, MacKay et al., 1999; Jia et al., 2006), in which these
two abilities were brought into varying degrees of alignment. At
the individual level, we only found marginally significant correla-
tions in the data corresponding to the mid-proficient learners.
Some learners could perform one of the two tasks at acceptable
levels of accuracy and yet exhibit a poor performance in the other.
Various reasons may have accounted for the lack of correla-
tions in the reported data. Presumably, the nonsignificant corre-
lations could be due to the different consonantal contexts in
which the vowels occurred in the perception and production
experiments. In the perception experiment, vowels were pre-
sented in an alveolar context, whereas in the production task, the
target vowels where elicited in different consonant environments.
Further, as Jia et al. (2006) suggest, results from certain percep-
tion and production tasks might not be comparable because of
differences in the difficulty ranking of these tasks. Learners found
the discrimination task quite difficult, in the sense that it required
a high level of auditory attention. In contrast, the production task
was cognitively less demanding so they could do it effortlessly.
Finally, the possibility exists that perception and production
abilities cannot always be brought into perfect alignment in
foreign language speech learning. The learners in the present
study lacked sufficient amount of exposure to the target language
in a naturalistic setting. In these conditions, it is unlikely that
their perceptual abilities will improve if they do not receive
specific training aimed at reducing perceptual confusion of L2
sounds.
Even though the PAM-L2 warns that its predictions on per-
ceptual learning may not be appropriate to foreign language
acquisition situations in which the target language is learned
through formal instruction and limited L2 exposure, the results
obtained here seem to suggest otherwise. The findings of the
perception experiment add modest evidence to two recent
studies by Levy (2009a, 2009b) in which the model’s predictions
of perceptual difficulty were also extended to foreign language
learning in a formal setting.
Similarly, the SLM focuses on populations who have spoken
the target language for many years, not beginners. One of the
hypotheses of this framework is that, eventually, adult L2 learners
might establish new phonetic categories for some L2 sounds if
they can perceptually distinguish a given L2 sound from its
closest L1 counterpart. We concluded that some mid-proficient
and proficient learners may have established new phonetic
categories for vowels /i / and /R/ in an alveolar context. Again,
these findings would suggest that category formation is not
totally out of reach for some EFL learners who learn the target
language in a predominantly L1-speaking environment.
The present study has some limitations in the sense that we
did not directly test which specific acoustic cues learners relied
on in discriminating the vowel contrasts. A question that should
be addressed in future research is whether listeners attend
exclusively to vowel duration and spectral differences and, to
what extent, crosslinguistic vowel perception is influenced by the
consonantal context. At present there is some evidence that L2
perception varies depending on the consonant environment
in which a vowel appears (Bohn & Steinlen, 2003; Levy, 2009a;
Levy & Strange, 2008). Subsequent studies should then focus on
testing discrimination of vowel contrasts in consonantal contexts
other than alveolar.
 L. Rallo Fabra, J. Romero / Journal of Phonetics 40 (2012) 491–508
Another limitation that should also be addressed in subse-
quent studies involves the methodological issue of how nativeli-
keness should be investigated in L2 learning in a formal setting.
The small significant differences between the three groups of
learners call for an examination of both perceptual and produc-
tion skills at the individual level, instead of at the group level. This
method has already been adopted by Bongaerts (1999) and
Birdsong (2007). Ideally, this approach would provide a useful
tool to single out the ‘‘exceptional’’ learners from the more
‘‘average’’ learners and thus solve the problem of within-group
variability in L2 speech research.
Acknowledgments
Parts of this work were presented at the AESLA, 2005 and the
ClaSIC, 2006, conferences, as well as, at the ASA 2nd Special
Workshop on Speech. This research was supported by grants
PB94-0919 and HUM2007-66053-C02-02/FILO, from the Spanish
Ministry of Education and Science, and SGR-2009-003 from the
Catalan Government. The authors would like to express their
gratitude to Ocke-Schwen Bohn and to the three anonymous
reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this
manuscript. Many thanks to Daniel Recasens for providing acous-
tic data from the Catalan database.
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