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Second-language (L2) learners have foreign accents that are influenced by their particular native (first) language (L1; Flege, 2002; Flege, Munro, & MacKay, 1995; Munro, Flege, & MacKay, 1996). It is less obvious, but equally important, that learners of an L2 also have an "accent" in their perception of the new language (Jenkins, Strange, & Polka, 1995), which is systematically related to the perceived similarities between the phonological segments of their L1 and L2 (Best & Strange, 1992; Flege, 1987). Although learners may find some nonnative contrasts easy to discriminate, it is common for two or more L2 phones to be perceived as identical or similar to just one native phoneme (Bohn, 1995; Bohn & Flege, 1992; Flege, Bohn, & Jang, 1997; Flege & MacKay, 2004; Goto, 1971; Guion, Flege, Akahane-Yamada, & Pruitt, 2000; Werker & Tees, 1984). However, difficulties in perceiving nonnative phones do not always persist as L2 proficiency increases (Flege et al., 1995; Ingram & Park, 1997; Tsukada et al., 2005), although it is unclear what drives this change and results in an increased nativelike perception or production. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of vocabulary size in how L2 learners learn to perceive these nonnative phones.
In particular, the paper investigates the role of vocabulary size on L2 vowel perception, taking into consideration the entire L1 and L2 vowel systems, rather than a subset of nonnative and native consonants or vowels. We focus on a whole vowel system for a number of reasons. As discussed in detail below, there is ample evidence that a learner's L1 vowel inventory (size and organization) influences how L2 vowels are perceived, and vowels are less discretely perceived (and articulated) than consonants (see, e.g., Strange, 1998a, 1998b), likely resulting in vowels being inherently more interconnected as a system. If this is the case, then failure to include the entire vowel system in a perceptual experiment could result in an ecologically invalid estimation of the perceptual flexibility L2 learners.
There is abundant evidence that the size and organization of the L1 vowel inventory influences how L2 learners perceive the vowel contrasts in their new language. For example, native speakers of Spanish, a language with no temporal or tense-lax...