Cue-reliance and vowel perceptual patterns of Cypriot Greek children who learn English

• Georgios P. Georgiou ^[1]
  1. [1] People’s Friendship University of Russia (
• Localización: Estudios de fonética experimental, ISSN 1575-5533, ISSN-e 2385-3573, Nº. 28, 2019, págs. 229-253
• Idioma: inglés
• Títulos paralelos:
  • Ponderación de rasgos y patrones perceptivos de las vocales inglesas en niños grecochipriotas que aprenden inglés
• Enlaces
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• Dialnet Métricas: 1 Cita
• Resumen
  • español

    El objetivo del presente estudio es investigar los patrones de percepción vocal de los niños grecochipriotas que aprenden inglés como lengua extranjera en Chipre y su ponderación de la señal durante la categorización de las vocales de la L2. Para este propósito, 26 hablantes nativos de griego chipriota participaron en experimentos de asimilación y discriminación de tipo AXB. Los resultados mostraron que los aprendices asimilaron dos o más vocales inglesas a una sola categoría fonológica de su idioma nativo. Además, su discriminación sobre los contrastes de las vocales inglesas seleccionadas varió de pobre a moderada. El pequeño inventario de vocales de la L1 de los aprendices dio lugar a múltiples asimilaciones de vocales de la L2 a la misma categoría fonológica de la L1 y la falta de experiencia lingüística impidió el establecimiento de nuevas categorías fonológicas. Es más, las señales temporales de las vocales de la L2 no se emplearon para su mejor ajuste en las categorías fonológicas de la L1 ya asimiladas. En general, las predicciones fueron consistentes con las suposiciones del Perceptual Assimilation Model-L2.

  • English

    The aim of the present study is to investigate the vowel perceptual patterns of Cypriot Greek children who learn English as a foreign language in Cyprus and their cue-reliance during L2 vowel categorization. To this purpose, 26 native speakers of Cypriot Greek participated in a perceptual assimilation task and an AXB discrimination task. The findings showed that learners assimilated two or more English vowels to a single phonological category of their native language. Furthermore, their discrimination over selected English vowel contrasts ranged from poor to moderate. The small L1 vowel inventory of learners resulted in multiple assimilations of L2 vowels to the same L1 phonological category and the lack of linguistic experience prevented the establishment of novel phonological categories. In addition, the temporal cues of L2 vowels were not employed for their better fitting to the already assimilated L1 phonological categories. The predictions were in general consistent with the assumptions of the Perceptual Assimilation Model-L2.

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