Resumen de Perceptual discrimination and categorization of vowels in different levels of foreign language instruction

Ane Icardo Isasi

• This paper reports on the development of L2 English vowel pair perception by adult L1 Spanish/Basque speakers of differing levels of English instruction. This study focuses on vowel pairs /i-ɪ/, /u-ʊ/ and /ʌ-ɔ/, with differing levels of proximity to native categories. Re-sults of two perceptual tasks show that learners are influenced by their native categories, but that regardless of level, they can still modify their representations. However, the success in categoriza-tion varies by sound based on acoustic distance and multiple category competition.