Replication Data for: Perception of English vowels across regional accents by Catalan-Spanish bilinguals

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Dataset abstract

This dataset contains the results of a study on cross-language and second-language vowel perception in Catalan-Spanish bilingual learners of English. The dataset includes behavioral data from two perceptual tasks, which were collected during two experimental sessions. In the first session, 33 L1 Catalan-Spanish bilingual participants completed (i) an L1 vowel identification test with Catalan vowels (ii) a socio-demographic and language background questionnaire, (iii) a cross-language vowel categorization task consisting of 210 trials, and (iv) a general vocabulary test (LexTALE; Lemhöfer & Broersma, 2012). During the L1 vowel identification task, participants were asked to identify which Catalan vowels they perceived in order to determine if they are able to hear the distinguish between the members of the Catalan mid vowel contrasts (i.e. /e/-/ɛ/ and /o/-/ɔ/). In the cross-language categorization task then, participants listened to English vowels produced in the three accents (i.e. Southern British English [S.Eng], Northern British English [N.Eng], and Australian English [AusE]) and indicated which Catalan vowel was most similar to that vowel, followed by a goodness-of-fit rating (i.e., how good an example of that Catalan vowel the sound was). In the second session, the same participants completed a second-language vowel categorization task with the same 210 trials, in which they were asked to identify which English vowel they heard and to rate how good an example of that vowel it was. Participants' identification accuracy in the second-language task was analyzed using a mixed-effects logistic regression model. The repository includes all raw and processed data, the R code used for statistical analysis, and the model outputs.

Article abstract

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.

• Verbeke, G., Escudero, P., Mitterer, H., & Simon, E. (under review). Perceiving and identifying vowels in regional accents of English: Evidence from Dutch- and Spanish-speaking L2 listeners. [Preprint article: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5522075].
• Verbeke, G., Escudero, P., Mitterer, H., & Simon, E. (2025)."Replication Data for: Perceiving and identifying vowels in regional accents of English: Evidence from Dutch- and Spanish-speaking listeners", https://doi.org/10.18710/FEC2BO, DataverseNO, DRAFT VERSION.
• Recordings of Australian English speakers were sourced from the following study: Elvin, J., Williams, D., & Escudero, P. (2016). Dynamic acoustic properties of monophthongs and diphthongs in Western Sydney Australian English. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 140(1), 576–581. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4952387
• Recordings of Australian English speakers were sourced from the following study: Estival, D., Cassidy, S., Cox, F., & Burnham, D. (2014). AusTalk: An audio-visual corpus of Australian English. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’14) (pp. 3105–3109). European Language Resources Association (ELRA). http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/520_Paper.pdf
• Recordings of Northern British English speakers were sourced from the following study: Strycharczuk, P., Kirkham, S., Gorman, E., & Nagamine, T. (2025). Dimensionality reduction in lingual articulation of vowels: Evidence from lax vowels in Northern Anglo-English. Language and Speech. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309251320581