A percepção da palatalização das oclusivas dentais por ouvintes pessoenses.

Abstract

The main focus of this study is to investigate how native listeners from João Pessoa – Paraíba - perceive the palatalization of the dental occlusives as regressive assimilation in their speech community. The specific purposes are to analyze if those listeners: (a) perceive the distinction between dental occlusive and affricate; (b) are aware of this phenomenon in their speech community; and (c) have dialectal identity regarding the behavior of the palatalization of the dental occlusives. In order to reach those objectives, it was developed a speech perception experiment, which was based on the Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 1972, 1994; WEINREICH, LABOV & HERZOG, 1968) and on the speech perception experiments of Lopes (2012), Soriano (2014), Oushiro (2015) and Henrique (2016). The main hypotheses were based on studies in terms of speech production (HORA, 1995, 1997; ANDRADE, 2008; HENRIQUE & HORA, 2012) and perception (HORA, 1994; LOPES, 2012), in relation to the phenomenon under analysis within the speech community of João Pessoa. They are: (a) the variables that influence speech production behave similarly in terms of speech perception; (b) native listeners from João Pessoa are aware that the dental occlusive is more characteristic in their dialect; and (c) they indicate that their pronunciation is the same as the most characteristic of their speech community. The stimuli were developed from the recording of a female speaker voice and they were set in an online speech perception experiment. Afterwards, the link of the test was provided for the native listeners from João Pessoa. In order to test the hypotheses, the data from the experiment was analyzed in the software R (R Core Team, 2013). The main results were: (1) the most relevant variants in statistical analysis of speech production studies behave similarly in terms of speech perception; (2) the listeners are aware that the palatalization of the dental occlusives is not a feature of their speech, neither of their speech community, despite the fact that they have associated the phenomenon under analysis as more characteristic of their speech than of their speech community.