Cross-language speech perception: Swedish, English, and Spanish speakers´ perception of front rounded vowels

Cross-language research on adult speech perception demonstrates a strong effect of linguistic experience on consonant perception but not on vowel perception. Our paper re-examines the effect of linguistic experience on adults´ vowel perception. First, identification and goodness functions for the high front quadrant of the vowel space were mapped for speakers of Swedish, English and Spanish. Second, speakers performed a discrimination task for one vector in this vowel space. Stimuli along this vector were identified by Swedish speakers as belonging to the Swedish front-rounded vowel series /ü:/-/ö:/. However, English and Spanish speakers reported that the stimuli were not in their language. Significant differences in discriminability of these stimuli were observed across speakers of different languages. Our results show that linguistic experience plays a significant role in vowel discrimination