Production of English initial /s/-clusters by speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and Argentine Spanish

Based on Flege’s (1995) claim that inaccurate perceptual targets may be responsible for misproductions of L2 sounds, this study investigates the relationship between perception and production of vowel paragoge by Brazilian EFL learners. Production data was obtained through the reading of sentences containingmonosyllabic target words of the form CVC followed by monosyllabic context words or silence. Perception data was obtained through an oddity discrimination test. The study involved twenty undergraduate students at the beginning level of English. Support for the perception-production relationship was provided by statistically significant correlation results. This study is innovative in that previous investigations focusing on the issue have dealt with distinctions between phonemes,whereas this deals with syllable structure and the addition of an extra phone.