Influência das variáveis sociais sobre as medidas formânticas em falantes pessoenses

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of social variables (gender, age group and level of schooling) on averages of Formantic Frequencies (F1, F2 and F3) in people who speak in João Pessoa. It was also proposed (I) to evaluate whether there is a statistically significant difference between the means found for the Formantic Frequencies (F1, F2 and F3) and the social variable gender (male / female); (II) to measure whether there is a statistically significant difference between the means found in the Formantic Frequencies (F1, F2, and F3) and the social variable age group (15-25 years / 26-49 years / + 50 years); (III) to investigate whether there is a statistically significant difference between the means found in Form Frequencies (F1, F2, and F3) and the social variable, level of education (0-4 years / 5-9 years / + 11 years). The informants of this research were totalized in 39 speakers, being 16 males and 23 females, distributed in the age groups (15-25 years / 26-49 years / + 50 years) and in schooling levels (0-4 years / 5-9 years / + 11 years). The informants recorded a script that consisted of the emission of the sustained vowel [Ɛ]; soon after recording the vehicle phrases with the Brazilian Portuguese (PB) oral vowels. All productions were extracted and edited using Praat software. After that time, the data were tabulated in Microsoft Excel 2010. The statistical tests to evaluate the hypotheses were extracted from the SPSS Software, which are: nonparametric tests (Mann Whitney and Kruskal Wallis). The main results obtained with the tests showed that there is a statistical difference between the averages of the formant frequencies and the gender variable, with the women presenting higher averages in comparison with the men. Regarding the difference between the formant frequencies and the age range variable, we found higher mean values for the group belonging to the age group of +50 years in relation to the other groups. The difference between the formant frequencies and the educational level variable, it was verified that the level of schooling +11 years presented higher values of averages when compared with the other levels.