On the status of terminal devoicing as an interlanguage process among Brazilian learners of English

Autores

  • Márcia Cristina Zimmer UCPEL
  • Ubiratã Kickhöfel Alves UCPel

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2008n55p41

Resumo

 

This paper investigates the status of Terminal Devoicing in the light of connectionism, by revisiting this process in a more dynamic framework. It focuses on the acquisition of two acoustic cues that distinguish final voiced from voiceless stops in English: (1) percentage of voicing in the stop closure; (2) length of the vowel that precedes the obstruent. Data obtained from Brazilian students of English were compared to those collected from American speakers, in order to check whether the learners' productions differed significantly from native speech. Results showed that neither voicing in the closure nor vowel length were totally neutralized, which indicates that learners are starting to distinguish final voiceless and voiced stops.

Biografia do Autor

Márcia Cristina Zimmer, UCPEL

Márcia Cristina Zimmer is currently a full-time professor of Applied Linguistics in the Graduate Program of Linguistics at UCPel (Catholic University of Pelotas) in Brazil. She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the Universidade Católica of Rio Grande do Sul and spent one year of her PhD program with the Department of Cognitive Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, working with connectionist models of second language acquisition. She has worked as an EFL instructor for 15 years in Brazil and has been advising graduate students on second language acquisition issues for 4 years. Her main research interests lie in the relations between cognition and speech production, as well as in ESL pronunciation.

Ubiratã Kickhöfel Alves, UCPel

Ubiratã Kickhöfel Alves holds a doctorate in Applied Linguistics from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul. He is currently a full-time professor at the Applied Linguistics Graduate Program of Linguistics at the Universidade Católica de Pelotas (UCPel) in Brazil. His main research interests are phonological theory, second language phonological acquisition and EFL pronunciation.

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Publicado

2008-01-01

Edição

n. 55 (2008)

Seção

Artigos

Licença

A revista Ilha do Desterro publica artigos e resenhas inéditos, referentes as áreas de Inglês, Literaturas em Língua Inglesa e Estudos Culturais. Publica volumes mistos e/ou temáticos, com artigos e resenhas em inglês e português. 

Autores mantém os direitos autorais e concedem à revista o direito de primeira publicação, com o trabalho simultaneamente licenciado sob a Licença Creative Commons Attribution que permite o compartilhamento do trabalho com reconhecimento da autoria e publicação inicial nesta revista.


Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.