This book, from the author's doctoral dissertation, describes an experimental study that investigated the perception of English and Spanish vowels by native and nonnative listeners. Fifty-four native English listeners studying Spanish and 17 native Spanish listeners studying English completed eight tasks—four in their second language (L2) and four in their first language (L1). Four tasks involved perception of natural speech vowel tokens, either within a word or in isolation. The remaining tasks asked listeners to identify the best exemplar vowel for groups of L1 and L2 words as well as all possible L1 and L2 vowels from a chart of 330 synthesized vowel sounds. Three primary findings emerged: L2 learners of Spanish identified naturally produced Spanish vowels more accurately than L2 learners of English identified naturally produced English vowels; all listeners identified vowels more accurately when they appeared within a word than in isolation; and L2 learners of Spanish identified naturally produced Spanish vowels more accurately than synthesized Spanish vowels.

Whereas many L2 speech perception studies examined listeners' performance in the L2, relatively few included an examination of the listeners' L1 performance. Doing so, however, is critical in order to understand the ways in which the L1 and L2 interact. Additionally, few studies have investigated the perception of L2 Spanish vowels. This study therefore helps to fill those voids in the literature. The book would have benefited, however, from more careful editing throughout. Numerous typographical errors make the presentation difficult to follow at times. Furthermore, the literature review contains a number of inaccuracies in the description or interpretation, or both, of individual studies. Finally, the research findings are compromised by a lack of control of language mode—because the subjects alternated between languages as they completed the tasks—and the failure to submit the results to tests of statistical significance. This study may nevertheless serve as a reference to those interested in pursuing experimental research on the perception of L2 vowels as well as the identification of best exemplar vowels and the range of acceptable vowel types.