Science Codex – Staff Writer
“In linguistics, a second language (or L2) is any language that a person acquires after their mother tongue. The first language, or L1, affects the use of the second one: for example if L1 does not have many variations of vowel pronunciation, and L2 is rich in them, it would be more difficult for a speaker to perceive and reproduce the vowel sounds of the second language. It can be hard for a native Spanish speaker to feel the difference between the sounds [i] and [i:] in English because in Spanish only [i] is used. A team of linguists from RUDN University studied the effect of L2 vocabulary size on the speakers’ ability to tell the difference between L2 vowel sounds. ” (more)