The relation between perception and production in L2 phonological processing

Seventeen French-English bilinguals read aloud a set of English sentences and performed an ABX discrimination task that assessed their perception of the English //-/i/ contrast. Global nativelikeness in production correlated with pronunciation accuracy for the vowels // and /i/, and both production measures correlated with self-estimated pronunciation skills. However, performance on the perception task did not correlate with either global nativelikeness or /,i/ pronunciation accuracy. These results are discussed in light of theories about the relation between perception and production in L2 phonological processing. Index Terms: speech perception, speech production, bilingualism, L2, phonology, phonetics, English vowels