Effects of vocabulary size on the perception of L2 phonological categories

Abstract For decades, bilingualism has been a topic of interest in speech perception research. Published studies aim to explain whether and how one can acquire phonological categories from an additional language that are not present in the first one. There is also an ongoing hypothesis that the size of second-language vocabulary contributes to the effective acquisition of L2 phonological categories. However, few studies have investigated this issue in foreign language learning (i.e., when a language is learned in a context where it is not widely spoken in the surrounding community). This is what the present study aims to investigate. An experiment consisting of an auditory AX categorization task and a vocabulary size test was conducted with 27 Brazilian Portuguese speakers. The results indicate a potential association between a more extensive second-language vocabulary and the ability to contrast L1 and L2 sounds more effectively.