Publications

This paper presents an acoustic analysis of the threecorner cardinal vowels in the Diapix Foreign Languagecorpus (DIAPIX-FL). English and Spanishnative speakers speaking both their L1 and L2 wereanalysed. We investigated to what extent L1 vowelcharacteristics influence the production of L2 vowels.The acoustic analysis shows vowels occupy amore compact F1/F2 space when speaking Spanishand a clear F1 spread for /a/ when speaking English,whether speaking natively or not. /u/-fronting in Englishoccurs for both native and non-native speakers,although the degree of /u/-fronting is much larger forthe English group. English speakers seem to createa separate category for the L2 /u/ rather than usingtheir L1 sound. The Spanish show some adjustmentin their English /u/ and /a/ realisations. We concludethat the transfer of L1 vowel characteristics to L2realisations is smaller than expected.