O emprego do acento nuclear em língua inglesa por falantes brasileiros: um estudo comparativo na era do Inglês como língua franca

Abstract

During second language acquisition, Brazilians speakers may transfer nuclear stress patterns from Brazilian Portuguese (BP) to English. Having this in mind, this Graduation Final Project aims to investigate the nuclear stress production by Brazilian speakers at the moment of English language production. Building on this idea, this study will consist of a comparative study of nuclear stress placement by native speakers of English and nuclear stress placement performed by Brazilian speakers. The theoretical basis stems from Exemplar Model, Probabilistic Linguistics and Usage Phonology in order to describe how a cognitive phonologic representation of nuclear stress works in the speech production of Brazilian speakers of English. To conduct this study, a sample of 88 participant was composed, 84 Brazilian speakers and 4 native speakers. All of them were prompted to read aloud a text for recording. Then, a sentence from this text was isolated. Following the recording, the data from the participants was analyzed through the Praat software and classified based on the nuclear stress placement produced. Given the data classification, based on the view of English as lingua franca, we attempt to analyze the data in relation to three linguistic criteria: a) proficiency level of the Brazilian speakers; b) formal period of studying English and c) period of experience in an English language country. Lastly, this study aims to determine how these linguistic criteria can influence the nuclear stress production of Brazilian speakers and to show if this nuclear stress placement can be included in the issue of inteligibility.