L2 Perception of Contrastive Vowel Nasality in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

Although not undisputed, it is generally agreed that Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has lexically contrastive vowel nasality, for instance between [si] ‘if; oneself’ and [sĩ] ‘yes.’ It is known that second-language (L2) learners of BP struggle with oral-nasal vowel contrasts in production (Head, Brian Franklin & Larissa Semenova-Head. 2010). Problemas na aprendizagem da pronúncia portuguesa entre falantes adultos de russo [Problems in the teaching of Portuguese pronunciation among adult Russian speakers]. Cadernos de Comunicação e Linguagem 2. 13–33), but less is known on how L2 learners perform in perception. This paper reports on a study that investigated the perception of BP contrastive vowel nasality by a group of English-native learners of BP and a native speaker control group to assess how non-native listeners perform in pre-lexical discrimination and lexical identification of contrastive vowel nasality. Although results from a vowel discrimination task revealed no differences between L2 and L1 listeners in terms of pre-lexical perception, a lexical identification task revealed that some oral-nasal vowel contrasts impeded lexical access in L2 listeners. These findings highlight how L2 listeners can perform comparably to L1 listeners in perception of non-native sound contrasts (here, vowel nasality) at the pre-lexical level, but may still struggle in encoding those contrasts at a lexical level.