Perception of English vowels across regional accents by Catalan-Spanish bilinguals

This study investigates how Catalan-Spanish bilinguals perceive and identify vowels produced in Southern British, Northern British and Australian English. Thirty-three participants completed a perceptual assimilation task and a second-language vowel identification task using naturally produced /CVC/-syllables. Results showed that peripheral English vowels were consistently mapped onto a single Catalan category with high goodness-of-fit, while other vowel-accent pairings, particularly those involving mid-vowel categories, displayed more variable cross-language mappings. Listeners' mappings also varied across the three regional accents and did not reliably predict L2 vowel identification accuracy, likely due to high input variability and the relative instability of L2 vowel representations.