Abstract
ABSTRACT Consonant clusters occur both in Portuguese and English. However, clusters are more productive in English than in Portuguese and there are sequences which are only found in English.This study focuses on the contrasts between American English and Brazilian Portuguese consonant clusters and on three strategies Brazilian learners tend to apply when producing them: adding the high front vowel (epenthesis) between the consonants in the clusters, discarding consonants, or introducing phonetic changes. The relevance of introducing English clusters to Brazilian learners of English is pointed out and discussed under the framework of the Speech Learning Model (SLM).
Highlights
This study focuses on the contrasts between American English and Brazilian Portuguese consonant clusters and on the strategies Brazilian learners tend to apply when producing them
Highlighting the Speech Learning Model (SLM) postulates and hypotheses which bear relevance to this study, the following claims are made: sounds in L1 and L2 are related perceptually at the phonetic level rather than at the phonological level; perceived phonetic dissimilarity between L2 and L1 sounds avoids the assimilation of distinct phonemic categories in L2 to only one phonemic category in L1, since this kind of assimilation blocks the formation of a new phonemic category in L1; L1 learning mechanisms remain intact over the life span
The speech production challenges English clusters pose to the Brazilian learner of English are multi-varied: linguistic productivity; distribution of the cluster in the syllable; phonetic features of the speech segments involved; language phonotactic features and orthographic misleading influences
Summary
This study focuses on the contrasts between American English and Brazilian Portuguese consonant clusters and on the strategies Brazilian learners tend to apply when producing them. A consonant cluster is a sequence of consonants without any vowel between (Roach, 1992). As Gouskova and Stanton (2019) point out, the bigger the consonant clusters are, the less common they are in languages. As far as it is known, sequences of maximum 6 consonants are found in the worlds languages (Gordon, 2016). Provide a list of the possible combinations between vowels (V) and consonants (C) in Portuguese. Nascimento (2016) provides a list of the English clusters based on Hammond (1999) and Pereyron (2008).
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