The relationship between the perception and production of English nasal codas by brazilian learners of English

This study aims at investigating the perception and production of the English nasals /m/ and /n/ in syllable-final position by 20 Brazilian EFL learners and 3 native speakers of American English. Perception was assessed by means of both a discrimination and an identification test. Production data was collected by means of a Sentence Reading Test. The results from the perception tests revealed that the Brazilian learners and the native speakers seemed to have difficulties in distinguishing between the coda nasals, although to different degrees. Interestingly, the context of the preceding vowel influenced the perception of both natives and non-natives. The production results show that the participants had difficulty to produce the coda nasals. Concerning the relationship between perception and production, a positive correlation was found between the results of the Brazilian learners in the two perception tests and in the production test.