Estudo acústico de /a/ acentuado na fala bracarense

Abstract

Linguistic studies (Barbosa, 1965 and 1994; Gonçalves, 2008; Martinet, 1985) suggest that the spoken speech in the north of mainland Portugal shows a particular phonetic variation characterized by the dominance of the variant [a] in all contexts in which the vowel occurs in stressed and open syllable. In view of this theoretical assumption, this paper reports the results of an acoustic study aimed at examining the phonetic realizations of vowel /a/ and identify which of the variants ([a] or [ɐ]) characterizes the speech of the city of Braga. To test the hypothesis on the predominant occurrence of the open vowel ([a]) in this city, the realizations of the target vowel (/a/) adjacent to nasal and oral consonants were acoustically analyzed in terms of the spectral quality by measuring the frequencies of the first two formants (F1 and F2). Furthermore, given that level of education is likely to be a determining factor in the phonetic realization of vowel /a/ (Rodrigues, 2003; Votre, 2004), we analyzed the speech production of two groups of informants with different levels of education (basic education and higher education). Our results show that in Braga’s speech the production of vowel [a] tends to occur in all studied contexts and that level of education had no effect on the productions of /a/ since the two groups of informants with different levels of schooling tended to show similar formant configurations in the production of [a] and [ɐ]. Finally, our results suggest that the phonetic variant that characterizes Braga’s speech is in fact the open vowel [a].