The production of non-modal phonation types in English vowels by Brazilian speakers

Abstract

Esling (2000) claims that each language has its own pattern of physiological behavior in which articulators are trained to operate in different ways based on the language’s phonetic structure. To test this claim, this study compares phonation types in speech production when Brazilians speak Portuguese and English. More specifically, we investigate coarticulation effects of consonants on vowels in English with regards of non-modal phonation. According to Garellek (2012), non-contrastive non-modal phonation happens in English vowels due to adjacent glottalized and aspirated consonants. However, this coarticulation effect does not happen in Brazilian Portuguese because voiceless stops have short lag VOT and neither voiced nor voiceless stops are allowed as codas. Thus, our hypothesis is that bilingual Brazilians do not produce non-modal phonation due to coarticulation when producing English vowels. To test this hypothesis, native speakers of English and Brazilians who are proficient speakers of English were recorded performing reading tasks in a soundproofed room. The target words containing the vowels to be measured were placed in a carrier-sentence. The acoustic analysis was based on H1*-H2*, H1*-A2*, and HNR measures. [Research funding by CAPES (Brazil) and Fulbright.]