Percepção do acento lexical do inglês por falantes nativos de português do Brasil

Abstract

This research investigates the perception of English cognate words lexical stress by Brazilian Portuguese (hereinafter BP) native speakers who learn English as a second language (hereafter L2). The cognates were chosen because, although they are similar to Portuguese in terms of spelling, they are pronounced according to the specific features of the English phonological system. The hypothesis is that the specific phonetic and phonological features of the English stress and the syllabic patterns differ from Portuguese and influence L2 perception, even though these two languages are characterized by having variable stress patterns. The justification for doing this research is: (1) to learn about the mechanisms involved in prosodic aspects of L2 speech from the listener's point of view; (2) to support the development of teaching-learning strategies for L2 pronunciation, as well as the elaboration of didactic materials aimed at improving the perception of prosodic aspects and oral comprehension that meet the specific needs of Brazilian learners of English. The following research questions were proposed: (1) Is the lexical stress of English cognate words correctly perceived by native speakers of BP who learn English as L2? (2) Which factors influence the perception of the English lexical stress as L2? The theoretical assumptions were based on English and Portuguese stress patterns studies, on speech perception and L2 acquisition research, as well as on phonetic and phonological description studies. An experimental methodology was used to answer the research questions. The corpus, recorded by a North American English native speaker, was composed of 80 English cognate words with variable stress patterns (oxytone, paroxytone and proparoxytone) and with different numbers of syllables (disyllabic, trissyllabic, quadrisyllabic and pentasyllabic). A perception test to identify the lexical stress of such cognates was applied to 30 English learners who were BP native speakers. A native speaker of English answered the same test. Acoustic measures of duration (ms), variation of f0 (Hz) and intensity (dB) of trisyllabic, quadrissyllabic and pentassyllabic cognates syllables were extracted. The result of the perception test showed that the lexical stress was correctly perceived in most cases. In addition, the analysis of the right and wrong answers indicated that a set of factors related to the cognates stress and syllable patterns influenced the identification of the English lexical stress. Regarding the acoustic parameters, the English stress identification was mainly influenced by syllabic emphasis and duration