Investigando desvozeamento vocálico no português brasileiro (PB) : análise acústica e perceptual das vogais altas pretônicas

Abstract

According to Gordon (1998), devoicing occurs in practically all the languages of the world he studied, including Brazilian Portuguese, being the high vowels more susceptible to the occurrence of the phenomenon that Gordon also associates with the deaf surrounding environment and atonicity. According to Meneses (2012, 2016), devoicing is related to the reduction in the magnitude of the vowel gesture, caused by the short articulation time, allowing the consonant gestures to overlap with the vowel gestures. Therefore, this PhD thesis investigates the phenomenon of the devoicing of the pretonic high vowels in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), both acoustically and perceptually, through the application of Gestural Phonology theory, taking into account the phonetic contexts that most favor this phenomenon. For acoustic analysis a total of 1,440 vehicle phrases were collected. For perception, 8,208 data were collected regarding identification and gradation, which, among other conclusions, converge with the results of Meneses (2012, 2016) and Hasegawa (1999), that is, that the devoiced vowels occur without prejudice to the perception of these vowels, which, like the devoicing, varies from individual to individual; and Gordon (1998), because the articulatory and aerodynamic factors that induce devoicing conflict with the perceptive factors, which advocate against devoicing, since, perceptually, there is no clear distinction between voiced and voiceless vowel, but a gradient between the extremes.