This study reports the results of two experiments aimed at assessing the perceived similarity between English and Catalan vowels and diphthongs. Perceived similarity judgements were elicited from speakers of both languages involved and were compared to first language identification data from the same speakers. In experiment 1, a group of 27 naive Catalan listeners performed a perceptual assimilation task in which they were asked to identify Catalan and English vowels in terms of native categories and provide a goodness of fit rating. In experiment 2, a group of native speakers of Southern British English performed an adaptation of the same task. The results showed that most non-native vowels were consistently perceived as instances of a given native category, with varying degrees of goodness of fit. In a few cases, assimilation scores were very high in both experiments, pointing to the possibility of near-identical or shared categories. A few asymmetrical mappings were found, which were linked to the influence of language-specific cues such as the role of vowel duration in English. These results emphasize the importance of contrasting native and non-native perception and the potential of reciprocal approaches for making predictions about non-native perception and second language development.

中文翻译：

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英语和加泰罗尼亚语听众对英语和加泰罗尼亚语元音的感知：对等的跨语言相似性研究

这项研究报告了两个实验的结果，这些实验旨在评估英语和加泰罗尼亚语元音和双元音之间的感知相似性。感知的相似性判断是从涉及两种语言的说话者得出的，并与来自同一说话者的母语识别数据进行了比较。在实验1中，一组27位朴素的加泰罗尼亚语听众执行了感知同化任务，要求他们根据母语类别识别加泰罗尼亚语和英语元音，并提供适合度等级。在实验2中，一组以南部英国英语为母语的人对同一任务进行了改编。结果表明，大多数非本地元音被一致地视为给定本地类别的实例，并且具有不同程度的拟合优度。在某些情况下，在两个实验中，同化得分都很高，表明可能存在接近相同或共享的类别。发现了一些不对称映射，这些映射与特定语言提示的影响有关，例如英语中的元音持续时间的作用。这些结果强调了对比本地和非本地感知的重要性，以及相互对立的方法对非本地感知和第二语言发展做出预测的潜力。