Comparing vowel perception and production in Spanish and Portuguese : European versus Latin American dialects

Recent acoustic descriptions have shown that Spanish and Portuguese vowels are produced differently in Europe and Latin America. The present study investigates whether comparable between-variety differences exist in vowel perception. Spanish, Peruvian, Portuguese, and Brazilian listeners were tested in a vowel identification task with stimuli sampled from the whole vowel space. The mean perceived first (F1) and second formant (F2) of every vowel category were compared across varieties. For both languages, perception exhibited the same between-variety differences as production for F1 but not F2, which suggests correspondence between produced F1 and perceived vowel height but not between F2 and frontness.