Production and perception in the acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese

Learning to listen to and produce the sounds of a new language is a difficult task for many second-language learners. While there is a large corpus of literature that investigates Spanish and Portuguese learners’ perception and production of an L2, particularly English, there is relatively little research available for the opposite scenario, namely, how speakers of other languages learn to perceive and produce the sounds of Spanish and Portuguese. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a critical review of the available literature in this less studied area. First some general facts relating to non-native and L2 speech perception and production are presented, including the theoretical models that aim at explaining these phenomena. A review follows of the empirical findings currently available for L2 speech production and perception in Spanish and Portuguese, and how these two abilities relate in the process of acquiring the sounds of these languages.