The interrelation between perceived and produced vowel spaces in Brazilian and European Portuguese

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the interrelation between the perception and production of vowels is not straightforward. For instance, it has been shown that the vowel spaces of Spanish and Czech may have different structures in production than in perception (Boersma and Chladkova, 2011). This study compares vowel perception and production of 40 speakers in Brazilian- (BP) and European Portuguese (EP). Productions were elicited in a sentence-reading task and were reported in Escudero etal. (2009). Perception was tested by means of a phoneme identification task with tokens sampled from the whole vowel space. Perceived and produced vowel spaces were compared through the location of vowel categories (the vowels' F1 and F2 averaged across speakers/listeners) and their boundaries with neighboring categories. The results show that the perceived vowel space of BP listeners differs from that of EP listeners. Specifically, low-mid vowels have a higher F1 in BP than in EP, a finding that is in line with BP and EP vowel production differences. However, BP low-mid vowels are less peripheral than EP vowels along the F2 dimension only in perception. Other dialectal differences as well as the degree of correspondence between the production and perception of Portuguese vowels are discussed.