The production of Norwegian vowels by French and Russian speakers

This study looks into the production of Norwegian front and central vowels spoken by native and second language speakers with backgrounds from French and Russian, respectively. The vowels’ first three formants were measured and normalized to reduce the effect of speaker gender. Based on the vowel systems of the three languages involved, larger deviations in Russian than in French L2 productions were hypothesized. The expectations were to a certain degree borne out by the data. Apart from vowel pattern deviations, the two L2 groups’ productions differ in terms of the scatter of the formant values. The results demonstrate the difficulty of explaining L2 acquisition behaviour by existing models.