Produção e percepção das vogais contrastivas de língua inglesa: uma análise à luz do conceito de inteligibilidade

Abstract

This work aims to discuss the concept of speech intelligibility in a second language, based on an analysis of the production and perception of native and non-native English speakers. Considering that we live in a globalized world in which most English speakers are not native speakers, bringing more and more characteristics of their mother tongue to the second language - and contributing to a very diverse dialectal variation -, English becomes defined by the Latin expression English as Lingua Franca or ELF (JENKINS, 2000, 2002, 2008, 2012; HULMBAUER; BOHRINGER; SEIDLHOFER, 2008; BECKER; KLUGE, 2014; 2015), which characterizes the use of this language by speakers of different mother tongues in a mutually intelligible way, without compromising communication. The focus of the analyzes to discuss the intelligibility construct was determined in contrastive vowel pairs of English, since they tend to present difficulties in perception and production by speakers of English as L2, given that the vowel system is quite different from a language to the other, being a striking feature of the production of a speaker of a given language. The dissertation focused on two types of analysis: 1) an acoustic analysis of contrastive English vowels produced by a native speaker of American English and three Brazilian speakers of English as L2, and 2) an analysis of the speakers' perception in relation to their own production and the production of other speakers through the application of a perceptual test. Regarding the acoustic analysis of the speakers' production, the observation of the collected and statistically treated data showed that there is a transfer process between L1 Brazilian Portuguese and L2 English regarding the duration of American English vowels. In addition, vowel height is a parameter that also poses problems for differentiating the contrasts between the vowel pairs analyzed in the production of English as a second language. Regarding the analysis of the data on the perception of the speakers, also treated statistically in this study, the results showed that 1) although there were statistically significant differences in the rates of correct answers and errors among the listeners, there was no difference in response time; 2) one of the speakers of English as an L2 had fewer errors than the native speaker in the perception tests; and 3) some stimuli produced by an English speaker as L2 had more hits in the perception test than those produced by the native speaker. Thus, the results of the analyzes allowed us to conclude that non-native speech can be as intelligible as native speech.