Presentation

Brazilian English X Brazilian Portuguese: A Dynamic Approach for the Analysis of Diphthongs in Forensic Contexts

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Abstract

This research proposes different objectives and purposes from traditional analyses about special characteristics of the pronunciation of Brazilian speakers of English. Instead of the educational context, the arena is the forensic context, where a Brazilian would be the suspect of a crime and, supposedly, his/her voice in English would be the evidence. The aim of this article is to demonstrate preliminary results of an experiment using acoustic analysis, traditionally used for speaker comparison in forensic phonetics. The voices of Brazilians and Americans were recorded speaking English and Portuguese, and the diphthong [aI] was compared in three perspectives – inter-speaker, intra-speaker and inter-language. Preliminary results demonstrate that Brazilians do pronounce diphthongs in a way that makes them different from American native speakers, with values of F2 always higher in the beginning and in the end of the diphthong. As for duration, Brazilians present a greater relative duration of the transition (approximant) when compared to the vowel nucleus.

How to Cite:

de Castro Gomes, M. L., (2015) “Brazilian English X Brazilian Portuguese: A Dynamic Approach for the Analysis of Diphthongs in Forensic Contexts”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings 7(1).