A percepção das vogais médias posteriores no português brasileiro

Abstract

Minimal pairs are attested in Brazilian Portuguese that establish the contrast between openand close-mid vowels in the stressed syllable. However, there are cases in which this two categories show free variation in this same context without semantic consequences. The purpose of this study was to verify whether this phenomenon is reflected in therepresentations stored in long term memory and employed in the perceptual processes. With this aim the contrasts between the back mid vowels [o] and [ý] and the contrast between [o] and [u] (the fonological status of the latter is doubtless) were compared in respect to theresults obtained by twelve Brazilian Portuguese native speakers in a vowel classification task and to the degree to which those same results predict the results in vowel discrimination tasks. Two discrimination tasks were used: the 2AFC task, that encourage labeling strategies based on categories stored in memory, and the 4I2AFC task, that encourages strategies based on the acoustical information. The mean of the slopes of the curves representing the proportions of ¡§ý¡¨ responses was significantly less then the slopes observed for the ¡§u¡¨ response. It was observed in a between subjects analysis a closer relationship between classification and discrimination results for the [u -o] continuum than for the [o-u] continuum. The results are interpreted as suggesting that the representations of the vowels [o] and [ý] are less distinct from each other than are the categories of [o] and [u].