Early and late bilinguals' vowel perception and production : English vowel contrasts that give Serbian-English bilinguals a H(E)AD-ache

Adults learning a second language (L2) ("late learners") have difficulty achieving a native speaker's level of accuracy in both perception and production of L2 phonetic segments. This difficulty often results in deviant production of L2 segments that is perceived as accented speech by native speakers of that language. It is generally agreed that this failure in non-native segmental production and perception is caused by previous linguistic experience with the first (L1) language. Late learners are expected to show stronger L1 effects than learners who learnt their L2 in early childhood ("early learners") (MacKay, Flege, Piske, amp: Schirru, 2001; Piske, Flege, MacKay, amp: Meador, 2002). The main hypotheses of this study derive from the predictions based on PAM and SLM that certain non-native contrasts will be difficult to discriminate by late learners of an L2. Discriminability of a non-native contrast is predicted by its assimilation pattern to one or more native categories. Furthermore, accuracy in perception of non-native segments is related to accuracy in production of these segments.