Plasticity in vowel and consonant perception by Chinese learners of Dutch-accented English (original) (raw)

This pilot study examines the real-time acquisition of English vowel and consonant contrasts by Chinese learners in the Netherlands during two testing periods, one at 6 months and another at 32 months of residence. Results indicated that while the learners showed improvement in both vowel and consonant identification, the enhancement in vowel perception was significantly greater than in consonant perception, and the length of residence did not significantly affect identification performance with respect to the speaker's accent.