Reciprocal measures of perceptual similarity

This paper reports the results of two experiments aimed at assessing the perceived similarity between a set of English and Catalan vowels from the perspective of native speakers of both languages. Two groups of 27 listeners, a group of native English speakers and a group of native Catalan speakers, used a 9-point scale to rate the degree of similarity between two stimuli. Crucial stimuli consisted of English-Catalan vowel pairs. The experiments also included same-category pairs from a single language. The results of the experiments showed that some mixed-language vowel pairs obtained similarity ratings that felt within the range of samecategory single-language pairs, revealing a perceptual overlap for some native and non-native phonetic categories. Further, Catalan listeners provided overall higher dissimilarity ratings than English listeners did, showing no relationship between smaller inventory size and greater withincategory variability. The outcomes are discussed in terms of the resulting predictions for second language perception.