Resumen de Polish listeners’ perception of vowel inherent spectral change in L2 English

Geoffrey Schwartz, Jerzy Dzierla

• This paper describes a perception experiment with Polish listeners involving vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) in L2 English. A forced-choice rhyming task employing the Silent Center (SC) paradigm revealed relatively uniform effects of stimulus type (SC, Initial, Middle, Final) on accuracy across two proficiency groups, despite greater overall accuracy on the part of the more proficient users. Analysis of individual vowel pairs used in the rhyming trials revealed some effects of proficiency on the degree to which formant movement in the stimuli affected identification accuracy. This research contributes to the relatively sparse literature on VISC in L2 acquisition. Phonological considerations underlying the degree of VISC in Polish and English are also discussed.