Listening to accented speech in Brazilian Portuguese: On the role of fricative voicing and vowel duration in the identification of /s/ – /z/ minimal pairs produced by speakers of L1 Spanish

Ubiratã Kickhöfel Alves,Luciene Bassols Brisolara

doi:10.5334/jpl.237

Abstract

This article reports the results of two experiments investigating the combined role of vowel length and length of fricative voicing in the identification, by Brazilians, of minimal pairs such as casa /z/ – caca /s/ produced by speakers of Spanish (L1). In Experiment 1, stimuli were manipulated so that length of voicing in the fricative was tested in two levels (100% or 0% of voicing) and vowel length was tested in four levels (25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the length of the total vowel). In Experiment 2, voicing length was tested in three levels (25%, 50% and 75% of voicing), combined with the four levels of vowel length (25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the length of the total vowel). Both experiments were run on TP Software (Rauber et al. 2012), and forty Brazilian listeners with no experience with Spanish took part in both tasks. The results show an interaction between the two cues, especially in the stimuli with no full voicing in the fricative. These findings provide additional evidence to the gradient status of speech in production and perceptual phenomena (Albano 2001; Albano 2012; Perozzo 2017), besides shedding light on the teaching of Brazilian Portuguese as an Additional Language.

Highlights

In Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the voiced ([z]) and voiceless ([s]) counterparts of the alveolar fricative differ phonologically, such as in the minimal pairs casa (‘house’) – caça (‘hunt-noun’) and rasa (‘shallow’) – raça (‘breed’), whose first members are produced with the voiced fricative (Cristófaro-Silva 2017; Seara, Nunes & Lazzarotto-Volcão 2015)
As this gradient status challenges the so-called binary distinction formalized by the traditional [voice] distinctive feature, it was necessary to determine how much voicing in the fricative proved necessary so that L1 Brazilian Portuguese listeners could identify the members of these minimal pairs as showing /s/ or /z/
The discussion on gestural borders promoted in Albano (2001) seems to be of paramount importance in understanding our data, as we have shown that the identification of the voiced or voiceless counterpart of the tested minimal pairs depends on the timing relations established between the acousticarticulatory cues of “fricative voicing” and “vowel length”, which interact with one another

Summary

Introduction

In Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the voiced ([z]) and voiceless ([s]) counterparts of the alveolar fricative differ phonologically, such as in the minimal pairs casa (‘house’) – caça (‘hunt-noun’) and rasa (‘shallow’) – raça (‘breed’), whose first members are produced with the voiced fricative (Cristófaro-Silva 2017; Seara, Nunes & Lazzarotto-Volcão 2015) This is a different scenario from Spanish, in which a phonological distinction between the voiceless and the voiced counterparts of the alveolar fricative does not occur (Alarcos LLorach 1965; Hualde et al 2010; Martínez Celdrán 2003; Navarro Tomás 2004; RAE 2011). As this gradient status challenges the so-called binary distinction formalized by the traditional [voice] distinctive feature, it was necessary to determine how much voicing in the fricative proved necessary so that L1 Brazilian Portuguese listeners could identify the members of these minimal pairs as showing /s/ or /z/

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