Perception of European Portuguese Mid-Vowels by Ukrainian–Russian Bilinguals

Mid-vowel contrasts often present perceptual challenges for speakers of languages that lack these distinctions. However, bilingual speakers, who have access to two phonological systems and exhibit greater metalinguistic awareness, might not necessarily encounter such difficulties. In this study, 27 Ukrainian–Russian bilinguals listened to an unfamiliar language, European Portuguese, and completed two tasks: an identification task where they assimilated the seven stressed oral Portuguese vowels to the closest Ukrainian categories and a discrimination task featuring the Portuguese vowel contrasts /ɛ/–/e/, /e/–/i/, /ɔ/–/o/, and /o/–/u/. No bilingual advantage was observed: the discrimination performance on all contrasts was slightly above or near a chance level (A-prime scores varied between 0.55 and 0.20). These perceptual difficulties may be attributed to the acoustic similarities between the vowels within the contrasts rather than to the differences between the phonological inventories of the languages (the most challenging contrast was not a mid-vowel contrast but acoustically similar /o/–/u/). Although with the back mid-vowel contrast, the difficulty seems to also stem from the possibility that both Ukrainian and Russian have only one back mid-vowel, /o/, and this category occupies a wider area in the vowel space of Ukrainian–Russian bilinguals. The results suggest that bilingual advantage does not always manifest itself in the perception of a new language, especially if two typologically close languages are involved.