Effects of the decrease in the frequency of the third formant in the approximant pronunciation of coda /r/ on the social perception of speakers in São Bernardo do Campo

• Autor(a) principal: Silveira, Gustavo de Campos Pinheiro da
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Domínios de Lingu@gem
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufu.br/index.php/dominiosdelinguagem/article/view/59761
• topic: /r/ em coda; /r/ retroflexo; Percepção sociolinguística; Matched-guise; Terceiro formante; Coda /r/; Retroflex /r/; Sociolinguistic perception; Matched-guise; Third formant

This study reports evidences that gradual differences in the frequency of the third formant in the pronunciation of coda /r/ can provoke equally gradual differences in how speakers are socially evaluated in São Bernardo do Campo, a city in Greater São Paulo. A sociolinguistic perception experiment designed according to the matched-guise technique (LAMBERT et al., 1960) was conducted with 58 residents of the city, which were asked to listen to a recording of the speech of a person reading a sentence, and then to fill out a questionnaire about the speaker. The auditory stimuli differed only in the tokens of coda /r/, each of them presenting only one of three levels of decrease in the third formant. The results indicate correlation between the decrease and the way in which the speakers were evaluated. The decrease in the frequency of the third formant correlated with the increase in the rate of the responses that evaluated the speakers as having more accent and as being resident of São Bernardo do Campo. This result suggests that social meanings of linguistic forms can vary gradually when indexed by gradual phonetic variables.