Production and Perception of Estonian Vowels by Native and Non-Native Speakers

The aim of the paper is to study the production of Estonian vowel categories by L2 speakers of Estonian with a Russianlanguage background and to compare the results with perception data from the same subjects. Ten native Estonian subjects and ten L2 speakers participated in both the reading of an Estonian text corpus and the perception experiment. It was found that mostly the production and perception results show similar patterns and thus lend support to the common standpoint that L2 perception predicts the accuracy of L2 production. However, evidence was found that despite the correct perceptual identification of L2 vowels, in L2 production the native categorical vowel representation outweighs the newer L2 category pattern.