Perception of Brazilian Portuguese vowels by Australian English and Spanish listeners

Many studies on non‐native speech and second language (L2) perception suggest that a second language learner hears with a foreign accent when listening to or perceiving the sounds of the new language (for a review see Strange, 1995, 2007; Escudero, 2005). It is well‐established that the learners’ native or first language influences how they hear and categorise L2 sounds (e.g., Flege, 1995; Flege, Bohn & Jang, 1997; Escudero, 2005; Best & Tyler, 2007). The present study examined group differences in the discrimination of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowels by Australian English monolinguals and Spanish listeners who learned English as their L2. It also investigated whether vowel inventory and vowel acoustic properties are equally good predictors of crosslanguage perception difficulty