SEQUEIRA, Danielle Silva de. A produção do <s> em posição intervocálica em
inglês como LE por aprendizes cariocas. Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ, Faculdade de
Letras, 2007. Dissertação de Mestrado em Lingüística.
Abstract
The aim of this study was to evaluate the oral production of the Brazilian
learners (carioca dialect) of American English as a foreign language considering
the letter <s> positioned between vowels under the focus of the Exemplar
Theory, proposal of an usage-based phonology (Bybee, 2001). The letter <s>,
positioned this way in Portuguese, is phonetically represented by /z/, while in
English there are three possibilities that may be considered as patterns: /s/, /z/
and /Ζ/.
The work was divided into three steps: go through first and second or
foreing language acquisitions (FL); make a survey of the factors that may affect
the acquisition of a foreign language; and analyze oral production and
associations made by each subject of the research (all students were either
studying in the last level of the English courses in which the recordings were
held or had just graduated)
The corpus was constituted by 54 mould-sentences. Those sentences
were composed by a verb (inavariable – “say”), a noun (object of analysis), and
an adverb (variable – working as a distractor word). The oral production of each
subject of the research was recorded, and further, analysed with the help of an
acustic analysis program called PRAAT, version 4.6.15.
Data pointed out the following results: when facing a new and unknow
word of the FL, the learner seems to access to mental webs of associations in
order to infer some information that might help him in his oral production and/ or
in identifying the meaning of the word. Those associations happen in both
languages (English and Portuguese) and seem to be related to the: (1) phonic
sequence, such as associating ‘crisis’ to ‘Chritmas’; (2) morphemic sequence ,
associating ‘louzy’ to ‘noisy’; and (3) to the writing form, associating ‘hose’ to
‘horse’. Besides the mentioned associations, there were cases in which the
learner produced [s] in words that the pattern sound is [z] in both English and
Portuguese (reside e preside). Such occurrences can only be explained if relied
on the usage-based phonology, that works the Exemplar Theory hypothesis and
mental lexicon in which the representation of the words integrate, for example,
phonological, morphological, semantics, orthographic, and pragmatic
information. Key-words: ACQUISITION, USAGE-BASED PHONOLOGY,
EXEMPLAR THEORY.