Bootstrapping in the acquisition of word stress in Brazilian Portuguese (original) (raw)
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Acquisition of English Stress Shift by Speakers of Brazilian PORTUGUESE1
2021
▪ ABSTRACT: By addressing the acquisition of the English stress-shift rule by speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, this article sheds more light on the debate about the influence of first language and formal instruction on the acquisition of a second language. We carried out an experiment in which 37 native and non-native English speakers were asked to pronounce the same words as single words, in stress clash and non-stress clash contexts in order to observe the productivity of this phenomenon. The results show that stress shift occurs in similar proportions in contexts with and without stress clash and that productivity of the phenomenon among the advanced-level learners was very similar to that of the native speakers. We also found that words ending in an obstruent do not favor the application of the rule, whereas words ending in long vowels or nasals do. These findings show that syllable structure and the segmental inventory of the first language affect the results in the target lan...
Revista Diadorim
This is a preliminary study in which we investigate the acquisition of English as second language (L2[1]) word stress by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP, L1[2]). In this paper, we show results of a multiple choice forced choice perception test in which native speakers of American English and native speakers of Dutch judged the production of English words bearing pre-final stress that were both cognates and non-cognates with BP words. The tokens were produced by native speakers of American English and by Brazilians that speak English as a second language. The results have shown that American and Dutch listeners were consistent in their judgments on native and non-native stress productions and both speakers' groups produced variation in stress in relation to the canonical pattern. However, the variability found in American English points to the prosodic patterns of English and the variability found in Brazilian English points to the stress patterns of Portuguese. It oc...
Revista de Estudos da Linguagem, 2019
many adults who learn a second language have a foreign accent to some extent. The misproduction of lexical stress (LS), which plays an important role in the prosodic structure of speech, contributes to the perception of a heavier foreign accent. Twenty-four Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers of English of four different selfreported levels underwent tests of production and perception of LS. This study aimed to describe how production and perception of lexical stress happen to BP speakers of four different self-reported levels. Acoustic data, as well as the percentage of scores in stress placement, were collected and compared to the production of a native speaker of American English (AmE). Syllable duration, total intensity, and relative intensity were the most important parameters used by the BP speakers to stress syllables. Hits in the perception task were greater than the production task, overall. Initially stressed words had the greatest hits in both production and perception. Overall, the BP speakers from this use, in AmE, the same acoustic parameters used in BP for signaling LS. The production, in regards of acoustic parameters use, gets closer to the native when the proficiency level increases. Cognate words were not relevant in the acoustic parameters choice of the speakers, but they were relevant for the stress position hits.
Lexical Stress in Brazilian Portuguese in Contrast with Spanish
Speech Prosody 2014, 2014
This study discusses stress assignment in prosodic, non-verbal words in Brazilian Portuguese, in comparison with descriptions of stress assignment for Spanish [9, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18]. Given the conflicting claims regarding stress assignment in Brazilian Portuguese (see [11, 1, 2, 10, 3]) there is still a need to revisit discussions on stress assignment in Portuguese. In general, stress assignment in Spanish has been explained through the interplay between the morphological and phonological domains. Similar descriptions for Portuguese still requires far more abstraction and use of artifacts than in Spanish, which makes Mattoso Câmara Jr.'s [4, 5] claim that lexical stress is unpredictable in Brazilian Portuguese surprisingly unchallenged.
Primary Word Stress in Brazilian Portuguese and the Weight Parameter
In this paper, we develop an analysis of primary word stress in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We evaluate the typological and language-specific arguments that are presented in the literature against the relevance of syllable weight in Portuguese, and show that none of them appears to be valid when confronted with cross-linguistic evidence or the facts of BP phonology. We then go on to show that stress in BP represents a mixed system, in which verbs receive stress as a function of the morphological categories of tense (past, present, future), whereas stress in non-verbs is prosody-based and sensitive to the distinction between heavy and light syllables. We finally propose a constraint analysis of this system, which we claim functions in the lexical part of a stratified model.
Distinguishing emphatic and Prosodic Word initial stresses: evidence from Brazilian Portuguese
In European Portuguese (EP), emphatic stress and initial stress have been reported to be optionally assigned to the first (or in some cases the second) syllable of a Prosodic Word (PW) ([1]). In Brazilian Portuguese (BP), initial stress (and/or Htone) has been claimed to be assigned with reference to the primary stress position and be dependent on the number of pretonic syllables within a PW ([2]). [3], [4] and [5] suggest that in BP secondary stress assignment essentially signals the beginning of the PW in emphatic contexts, however. Although [5] reports that in emphatic contexts the initial stress and the 'H-tone' can coincide with a secondary stress, the nature of this type of stress and the difference between emphatic stress and PW initial stress in BP is in general not discussed. In this paper we argue that, although the two types of stresses in BP are tonally signaled, they are distinct, both in function and in distribution. Empirical data from two varieties of Portuguese spoken in Brazil (Paraná and Minas Gerais states) are presented, showing that the emphatic stress has a wider distribution than the initial stress, in neutral contexts. The emphatic stress may occur in any syllable from the stressed syllable leftwards, within the PW, including the syllable immediately adjacent to word-stress. The initial stress, by contrast, is found on the first or second pretonic syllable of PW, and there is a minimal distance of two syllables between initial stress and word-stress (e.g. governaDOres 'governors') ([2]). We argue that the initial stress is an edge phenomenon, marking PW initial positions, unlike the emphatic stress. In both cases, the tonal association is evidence for the PW domain in BP, because neither type of stress exceeds the limits of this domain (i.e. none of them can appear in post-tonic syllables of non-final PW).
Perception and Production of English Stress by Brazilian Speakers
2014
This study investigates the perception and production on the assignment of stress by 20 Brazilian speakers on English words stressed on the fourth syllable from the end. According to Brawerman (2006), which investigated only production, this pattern is difficult for Brazilian learners of English because it is an extremely rare stress pattern in their first language. The production test consisted of 40 words which were stressed on the fourth syllable from the end and 20 words which had other kinds of stress patterns and worked as distractors. The participants were recorded reading these words three times. They were also submitted to a computerized perception test designed with identification tasks which the participants listened to the words and had to click on a number corresponding to the number of the stressed syllable. Results show 85,4% of correct answers in the perception test, but 28,4% on the production test.
Word stress perception in European Portuguese
Interspeech 2013, 2013
Previous research has reported stress "deafness" for languages with predictable stress, like French, contrary to languages with non-predictable stress, like Spanish ([1], [2], [3], [4]). The contrastive nature of stress appears to inhibit stress "deafness", but segmental and/or suprasegmental cues may also enhance stress discrimination ([5], [6]). In this study we carried out two experiments aiming to investigate stress perception in European Portuguese (EP), a language with non-predictable stress that utilizes duration and vowel reduction as main cues to stress. We used nonsense words that differed only in stress location, thus removing vowel reduction as a cue to stress. Experiment 1 was an ABX discrimination task ([1]). Experiment 2 was a sequence recall task ([2]). In both experiments, the stress contrast condition was compared with a phoneme control condition, in nuclear and post-nuclear position. Results of both experiments strongly suggest a stress "deafness" effect in EP. Despite its variable nature, word stress is hardly perceived by EP native-speakers in the absence of vowel reduction. These findings have implications for claims on prosodic-based cross-linguistic perception of word stress in the absence of vowel quality, and for stress "deafness" as a consequence of a predictable stress grammar.
Perceptual Training Effects on the Acquisition of English Stress by Brazilian Learners
International Journal of English Linguistics, 2017
This study investigates the effects of perceptual training on Brazilian English language learners’ ability to acquire preantepenultimate stress, or stress on the fourth to last syllable. Since preantepenultimate stress assignment is infrequent in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), it was initially hypothesized that BP speakers would store few examples of this pattern. The training was performed in five sessions and included stress identification tasks followed by immediate feedback. Results confirm the training significantly improved study participants’ perception and production of preantepenultimate syllable stress assignment. Furthermore, participants generalized acquired production patterns to unfamiliar words and retained these patterns for two months after training concluded. With frequent perceptual training, it is believed BP speakers could create a new category of English words with preantepenultimate syllable stress. This study demonstrates that perception training, typically used ...
This paper investigates the presence of phrase-initial high tones in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and in Peninsular Spanish neutral declaratives. Like in other recent work, we observe that neutral declarative sentences in BP very frequently present high initial pitch events, which may be classified as either pitch accents or phrasal tones. We further observe that phrasal tones in initial position in BP neutral declaratives can be expressed as either a peak or a plateau. By analyzing comparable materials in Peninsular Spanish, we conclude that this language lacks the phrase-initial high tone phenomenon, also in agreement with previous work. We argue that F0 is a less reliable cue of stress in BP than in Spanish, since pitch excursions frequently occur on phrase-initial syllables that lack lexical stress. To compensate for this diminished reliability, duration plays a much greater role as a cue of lexical stress in BP than in Spanish. As the reliability of F0 as a cue of stress decreases, the reliability of another stress cue increases.