Consonantal context and experience effects on American L2‐learners’ perception of French vowels

According to Best’s [Best, C. T. (1994). ‘‘The emergence of native‐language phonological influence in infants: A perceptual assimilation model,’’ in The Development of Speech Perception: The Transition from Speech Sounds to Spoken Words, edited by J. Goodman & H. C. Nusbaum (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA); Best, C. T. (1995) ‘‘A direct realist view of cross‐language speech perception,’’ in Speech Perception and Linquistic Experience Issues in Cross‐Language Research, edited by W. Strange (York Press, Baltimore, MD)] Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM), listeners’ perceptual assimilation of unfamiliar speech sounds predicts their discrimination accuracy of these sounds. This study applied the PAM to second‐language (L2) learners. Three groups of American English (AE) listeners performed a perceptual assimilation (PA) task involving Parisian French (PF) vowels /y‐œ ‐u‐o‐i‐e‐a/ and a categorial discrimination task involving French front versus back rounded pairs /y‐u/, /y‐o/, /œ ‐o/, /œ ‐u/, front rounded versus ...