The Production of English Final [¬] by Brazilians
Daniel Hinckel Martins | 2011
Research regarding the production of English final [¬] (male [mey¬]) by Brazilian speakers of English as a second language has not been extensively conducted. The studies conducted with this purpose found out that Brazilians usually produce the final [¬] as [u] (‘goal’ [gou]) or [w] (‘soul’ [sow]) (Baptista, 2001; Avery & Ehrlich, 1992), a fact later confirmed by Moore (2004) and Baratieri (2006). Bearing these limitations in mind, this research aims at analyzing the way Brazilian speakers of English as a foreign language produce the English final [¬]. Moreover, this research also aims at verifying if participants’ non-linguistic variables (such as age, education, attendance to English courses, and level of proficiency) influence the way they produce the target-phoneme. In order to investigate that this study verified Silveira’s (2011, in press) data, which was gathered from 62 Brazilians, 31 living in Brazil and 31 living in the United States. A questionnaire was used to collect participants’ background information, and a sentence reading test was used to collect the oral data. Participants had to read sentences containing the words ‘while’, ‘whale’, ‘file’, ‘male’, and ‘pale’. After transcribing the results, it was possible to verify that Brazilians produce the English word-final /l/ in four different ways: a vocalized form [w], a non-vocalized form [¬], vowel insertion [lI], and deleting the final [¬] phoneme. Regarding the influence of the non-linguistic variables, three of them had direct relations to the way the target-phoneme is produced. Age and EFL courses presented a weak but significant relations to the productions of the phoneme /l/, while the variable level of proficiency showed a strong relationship to the way participants realize the English final [¬].