A percepção de vogais médias pretônicas e sua relação com os processos de harmonia e de alçamento vocálico

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate the perception that native speakers have of Brazilian Portuguese pretonic mid vowels /e/ and /o/ in pretonic position on words in context for harmony and vowel raising processes. In creating the identification test, the audio files stimulus were edited and normalized in the Praat software (BOERSMA; WEENINK, 2012) and presented to the informants in the form of a perception test using the TP software (RAUBER; RATO; KLUGE; SANTOS; FIGUEIREDO, 2012). In this study, 40 informants participated, being 20 females and 20 males, aged between 18 and 30 years old, born in the city of Pelotas, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, with an ongoing or completed undergraduate degree. The results were statistically analyzed in the IBM SPSS software version 20.0. The statistical analysis showed that the perception of pretonic mid vowels [e] and [o] was more accurate than the perception of pretonic high vowels [i] and [u], resulting from the harmony and vowel raising processes. Considering a possible relationship between the perception of the vowels and the use of phonological processes, this study has been based on the theory of the Model of L1 Processing (BOERSMA, 2007), which allowed to show the interaction of faith and struct constraints with cue constrains through, respectively, the Phonological Forms of Surface and Underlying and the Phonetic Form, linking Phonetics and Phonology