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Recent acoustic descriptions have shown that Spanish and Portuguese vowels are produced differently in Europe and Latin America. The present study investigates whether comparable between-variety differences exist in vowel perception. Spanish, Peruvian, Portuguese, and Brazilian listeners were tested in a vowel identification task with stimuli sampled from the whole vowel space. The mean perceived first (F1) and second formant (F2) of every vowel category were compared across varieties. For both languages, perception exhibited the same between-variety differences as production for F1 but not F2, which suggests correspondence between produced F1 and perceived vowel height but not between F2 and frontness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines four acoustic properties (duration F0, F1, and F2) of the monophthongal vowels of Iberian Spanish (IS) from Madrid and Peruvian Spanish (PS) from Lima in various consonantal contexts (/s/, /f/, /t/, /p/, and /k/) and in various phrasal contexts (in isolated words and sentence-internally). Acoustic measurements on 39 speakers, balanced by dialect and gender, can be generalized to the following differences between the two dialects. The vowel /a/ has a lower first formant in PS than in IS by 6.3%. The vowels /e/ and /o/ have more peripheral second-formant (F2) values in PS than in IS by about 4%. The consonant /s/ causes more centralization of the F2 of neighboring vowels in IS than in PS. No dialectal differences are found for the effect of phrasal context. Next to the between-dialect differences in the vowels, the present study finds that /s/ has a higher spectral center of gravity in PS than in IS by about 10%, that PS speakers speak slower than IS speakers by about 9%, and that Spanish-speaking women speak slower than Spanish-speaking men by about 5% (irrespective of dialect). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Naive listeners' perceptual assimilations of non-native vowels to first-language (L1) categories can predict difficulties in the acquisition of second-language vowel systems. This study demonstrates that listeners having two slightly different dialects as their L1s can differ in the perception of foreign vowels. Specifically, the study shows that Bohemian Czech and Moravian Czech listeners assimilate Dutch high front vowels differently to L1 categories. Consequently, the listeners are predicted to follow different paths in acquiring these Dutch vowels. These findings underscore the importance of carefully considering the specific dialect background of participants in foreign- and second-language speech perception studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]