The perception of American English vowels by Salento Italian adult listeners : longitudinal development in the classroom context

The present study investigates whether phonetic lessons enable improvement of adult L2 perception and whether 2) L2 perceptual learning in the classroom setting can be explained by the Second Language Linguistic Perception (L2LP) model (Escudero, 2005). Salento Italian (SI) listeners' initial state of perception of American English (AE) vowels was examined. SI listeners performed crosslanguage assimilation and discrimination tasks on AE vowels before attending a phonetic course (pre"test), at the end of the phonetic course and three months later (post"tests). Their perceptual assimilation of AE phonemes did not change across the test sessions, while their discrimination of the same AE vowels improved for two of the nine contrasts in both post"test sessions, approximating native discrimination, but worsened for two other contrasts. It is argued that both results can be explained in terms of the L2LP model.