Effects of Age on VOT: Categorical Perception of Swedish Stops by Near-native L2 Speakers

This study is concerned with effects of age of onset of L2 acquisition on categorical perception of the voicing contrast in Swedish word initial stops. 41 L1 Spanish early and late learners of L2 Swedish, who had carefully been screened for their ‘nativelike’ L2-proficiency, as well as 15 native speakers of Swedish participated in the study. Three voicing continua were created on the basis of naturally generated word pairs with /p t k b d g/ in initial position. Identification tests revealed an overall age effect on category boundary placement in the nativelike L2 speakers’ perception of the three voicing continua. Only a small minority of the late L2 learners perceived the voicing contrast in a way comparable to native-speaker categorization. Findings concerning the early learners suggest that most, but far from all, early L2 speakers show nativelike behavior when their perception of the L2 is analyzed in