Inteligibilidade de palavras terminadas com morfema ed no contexto de inglês como língua franca

Abstract

The globalization is a reality and, the needs for communication among the peoples with different mother languages, has been growing even more. To do so, English has been chosen as the worldwide Lingua Franca. It is extremely important to analyze the Brazilian speakers' intelligibility, mainly because they possess special speaking characteristics in the pronunciation of some words, which may cause communication breakdowns. One of these characteristics is the production of an epenthesis in the pronunciation of words ending with the morpheme ed. A guide proposed by Jennifer Jenkins called Lingua Franca Core (LFC) whose objective is show the most important phonetic parts and which of them are important to avoid intelligibility problems among English as a Lingua Franca speakers. Nevertheless, this guide does not mention anything about the epenthesis. To verify if this phenomenon causes any kind of communication breakdowns, some tests were done with English native speakers, Brazilian speakers and speakers with different nationalities, who evaluated sentences recorded by Brazilians with different proficiency levels. The same participants also evaluated if the Brazilian accent has any influence to an effective communication. The results showed that, even with the proven epenthesis in the words ending with ed, this was not an important factor for communication breakdown among the Brazilians and their listeners. Other factors, however, which the LFC points out as less relevant, had a significant role in this breakdown.