The relationship between perception and production of Brazilian Portuguese vowels in European Spanish monolinguals

This study investigates the relationship between non-native perception and production of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowels by eight European Spanish monolinguals. Participants’ accuracy on a non-native discrimination task was used to predict performance in non-native production. We also investigated the acoustic similarity between participants’ non-native and native vowel productions. The findings indicate a perception-production link: non-native vowels which were perceptually difficult to discriminate were also less stable and more varied when produced. These findings support the claim of the Second Language Linguistic Perception model (Escudero, 2005; van Leussen & Escudero, 2015) that learners initially perceive and produce the sounds of a second language according to the acoustic properties of the sounds produced in their native language.