Quantitative analysis of fundamental frequency in Spanish (L2) and Brazilian Portuguese (L1)

Pablo Arantes,Cristiane Conceição Silva

doi:10.20396/joss.v10i00.15779

Pablo Arantes, Cristiane Conceição Silva

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.20396/joss.v10i00.15779

Copy DOI

Abstract

This paper analyzes the intonation of Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) produced by monolingual speakers of both languages and bilingual BP speakers that lived in Spain on average for 6 years. Bilinguals produced data in both Spanish L2 (BL2) and BP L1 (BL1). Speech materials are sentences in different modalities (declaratives, yes-no and wh-questions) and reading styles (isolated sentences and storytelling). Fundamental frequency (f0) contours were analyzed to assess learning in Spanish L2 and language attrition in the L1 production of bilinguals. Variability in the f0 contours of the four language conditions was gauged by means of three indices (peak rate, peak range and global standard deviation). Dynamic time warping (DTW) distances between pairs of f0 contours were also measured as a way to measure within- and between-language differences in intonation patterns. The main results are: 1) BL2 and BL1 contours are significantly more variable than the monolingual ones both quantitatively and qualitatively; 2) BL2 contours partially converge towards the patterns of Spanish monolinguals, showing that there is learning; 3) there is evidence for language attrition in the form of transfer of Spanish patterns to BP contours produced by bilinguals; 4) Learning and attrition levels are different depending on sentence modality, such that learning is greater in modalities that differ less between BP and Spanish and attrition is greater in modalities that differ the most.

Highlights

IntroductionIn this paper we focus on the modality function and analyze intonational differences between fundamental frequency ( f0) contours in Spanish as a second language (L2) compared to Spanish as a mother tongue (L1) and Brazilian Portuguese ( BP) as a mother tongue spoken by monolingual ( on monolingual BP (MP)) and bilingual Brazilian speakers ( on BL1) in declarative sentences, yes-no and wh-questions
Intonation conveys many different communicative functions [1,2,3,4,5]
This study aims at comparing the f0 contours of declarative sentences, yes-no questions and wh-questions produced by Brazilian speakers of Spanish L2 with those produced by L1 Spanish speakers and BP L1 contours produced by monolingual and bilingual Brazilian speakers

Summary

Introduction

In this paper we focus on the modality function and analyze intonational differences between fundamental frequency ( f0) contours in Spanish as a second language (L2) compared to Spanish as a mother tongue (L1) and Brazilian Portuguese ( BP) as a mother tongue spoken by monolingual ( on MP) and bilingual Brazilian speakers ( on BL1) in declarative sentences, yes-no and wh-questions. We will look for evidence of learning in the production of L2 speakers by comparing it to the monolingual Spanish speakers and for evidence of language attrition by comparing bilingual’s L1 production to the control monolingual BP speakers. We present the most relevant details of how both monolingual Spanish and BP speakers implement sentence modality in terms of intonation (sections 1.1 and 1.2). We present results of studies that deal with Brazilian bilinguals learning Spanish L2 intonation (section 1.3). We lay out the goals of the present study and the research questions we investigate (section1.5)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion