The relationship between Australian English speakers’ non-native perception and production of Brazilian Portuguese vowels

This study investigates the relationship between non-native perception and production of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowels by six Australian English (AusE) monolinguals. Participants’ non-native categorization and discrimination patterns were used to predict performance in non-native production. We further investigated the acoustic similarity between participants’ non-native and native vowel productions. The findings indicate a perception-production link. In particular, non-native vowel production was acoustically similar to native vowel production. We also found that perceptually difficult non-native vowel contrasts were predominantly produced as one single non-native category