A percepção de vogais do inglês americano por falantes nativos do português brasileiro e falantes nativos da língua japonesa

Abstract

This project aims to develop a study on the perception of vowel sounds in English as L2 by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese. The singularity of this research is to involve two languages from different families and to verify the influence of their characteristics in the perception of sounds of a third language from the same task. As theoretical contribution, we will base on the Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1995) which defends the need for L2 learners to create perceptual targets so that new categories of sounds are constituted. Each language has an inventory of its own phonemes and therefore, when we acquire a new language, L1 interference makes it difficult to perceive sounds that are discriminated in the L2 and not in the L1, which, in turn, interferes with the quality of production of these sounds by L1 speakers. For analysis purposes, vowel sounds were chosen, because the sound inventory of the three languages presents a diverse number of phonemes. In the Japanese language there are 5 oral vowel phonemes, in the Portuguese language there are 7, while in the English language there are 10. As research participants, we have a native speaker of American English who will perform the speech production task and native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese who will perform the perception task. As research questions we have: How does the phonemic inventory of the Japanese and Portuguese languages as L2 affect the processes of assimilation of two sounds discriminated in the L1, but not in the L2, and prevent the formation of new categories? Which pairs of vowel sounds in English are assimilated into just one sound in Portuguese and just one sound in Japanese? The hypothesis is that both Brazilian and Japanese students will not be able to perceive some pairs of English sounds and will assimilate two sounds to a sound of their mother tongue, but there will be differences between the assimilated pairs, as the phonemic inventories of the two languages are different. The methodology used is of experimental nature and comprises a test of perception of vowel sounds in American English. The vowels of the stimuli submitted to the perception test are analyzed both in terms of articulatory and acoustic systems. The results show the influence of the phonemic inventory of the L1 on the perception of the L2 and demonstrate that there are differences in relation to the perception between high and low vowels. The distinction between English high front and high back vowels was better perceived by Brazilians but the discrimination between mid and low front vowels was better perceived by Japanese. This kind of difference can be interpreted in relation to the vowel allophony encountered in Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese