A produção das vogais altas anteriores do inglês por aprendizes brasileiros

Abstract

The present study reports on the results of a small-scale study which looks at acoustic features of English high front vowels produced by Brazilian learners of English, who were enrolled at two level-one groups (beginners) from an extension course. Normalized and non-normalized plots were built to look at how vowels are organized in the participants’ L2 vowel space regarding sex differences. Results suggest that the English high front vowels are produced as equivalent vowels and tend to overlap. The tense vowel was lowered and centered, whereas the lax vowel was raised and moved frontwards. Thus, learners’ tendency, at least at the current stage of language acquisition, was to merge two different categories into one, supporting Flege’s (1995) Speech Learning Model.