Eleonora Cavalcante Albano

O Português brasileiro e as controvérsias da fonética atual: pelo aperfeiçoamento da Fonologia Articulatória

The paper examines the recent trends of phonetic studies in Brazil, a productive area which analyses Brazilian-Portuguese data and contributes to phonetic theory. The central question discussed in the approach is the relationship between Phonetic and Phonology.

Conditions favoring biomechanically driven CV co-occurrence in lexicons

Abstract After having received serious consideration in the 1990s, the hypothesis that biomechanics is phonologized into probabilistic phonotactics subsided for methodological difficulties, while related child language studies gained ground. This paper aims at restoring the original adult language orientation of the discussion of biomechanically driven consonant–vowel co-occurrence. It presents new, detailed evidence on two languages, British English and Brazilian Portuguese, where there is clear lexical support for two CV co-occurrence biases attributable to biomechanics: a trend for the combination of coronal consonants with front vowels, and a trend against the combination of dorsal consonants with front vowels. It also shows that such biases are stronger under conditions that complicate speech planning. The analysis uses log-linear modeling in conjunction with other statistical techniques to assure comparability with previous studies and reliability of multiple comparisons. Low overall effect sizes indicate that biomechanically driven CV biases only weakly affect free combination. However, under such complicating conditions as repetition or lack of stress combined with occlusion/obstruence in initial position, effect sizes grow and significant factor interactions emerge, suggesting that such biases help simplify speech planning. Revisiting the phonologization of biomechanics hypothesis with today׳s tools supports it sufficiently to justify further pursuit and search for explanations.

From Reduction to Apocope: Final Poststressed Vowel Devoicing in Brazilian Portuguese

This is a study of final poststressed vowel devoicing following /s/ in Brazilian Portuguese. We contradict the literature describing it as deletion by arguing, first, that the vowel is not deleted, but overlapped and devoiced by the /s/, and, second, that gradient reduction with devoicing may lead to apocope diachronically. The following results support our view: (1) partially devoiced vowels are centralized; (2) centralization is inversely proportional to duration; (3) total devoicing is accompanied by lowering of the /s/ centroid; (4) the /s/ noise seems to be lengthened when the vowel is totally devoiced; (5) aerodynamic tests reveal that lengthened /s/ has a final vowel-like portion, too short to be voiced; (6) lengthened /s/ favors vowel recovery in perceptual tests. This seems to be a likely path from reduction to devoicing to listener-based apocope.

Codificação estatística das categorias fonéticas: vestígio da dinâmica da fala na fonotaxe lexical

This paper presents a new, intriguing finding and discusses some ofits theoretical implications: phonetic categorization, including majorclass membership, is entirely predictable from phonotactic biases inthree Brazilian Portuguese word databases. The predictors are logfrequencies of ‘VC, ‘CV and V’CV sequences consisting of the 7stressed vowels combined with the 19 onset consonants, plus the 5Southeastern pre-stressed vowels. Correct vowel categorizationarises through discriminant analysis of ‘VC and ‘CV data. Correctconsonant categorization arises through discriminant analysis of V’CVdata. Results are consistent across databases and, thus, strongly suggestthat statistical biases in the lexicon can be so stable as to code phoneticcategories. The findings and their corollaries bear on the issue of therelationship of lexical phonotactics to speech dynamics.