The production and perception of English vowels by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese living in Victoria, Canada
Date
2017-08-28
Authors
Romig, Silas
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
This thesis focuses on the production and perception of ten English vowels (/i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ, ʌ, ɑ, o, ʊ, u/) by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) living in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The participants consisted of 14 native speakers of BP (divided into intermediate and advanced second language (L2) English proficiency groups), plus six native speakers of Canadian English (CE) as control participants. Four experiments were carried out: two pertaining to production and two pertaining to perception. The production tasks consisted of CE and BP wordlist reading tasks in order to measure the duration and first two formants of the participants’ vowels, while the perception tasks consisted of an identification task and an oddity-discrimination task. With regards to production, this thesis investigates how the participants’ productions of the L2 vowels differ between the experimental and control groups with respect to their formant frequencies and the Euclidean distances (EDs) between various English vowel pairs. Similarly, the participants’ perceptual abilities, as measured by their performance on the perception tests, are examined. Finally, the connection between perception and production is investigated. The findings indicate (a) a positive effect of proficiency, as the advanced participants showed a greater ability to both produce and perceive the L2 vowels, but that (b) participants of both proficiency levels have difficulty in contrasting certain English vowel pairs in a native-like fashion. Furthermore, the findings provide evidence of a connection between perception and production, and show that perception outperforms production, as predicted by the Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1995, 2005). Finally, the findings indicate a possible positive effect of environment (i.e., an English-speaking country) when compared to previous studies (Bion et al., 2006, Rauber, 2006). Pedagogical implications of these findings are also discussed.
Description
Keywords
Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, Brazilian Portuguese, Vowels, Phonetics