A cross-dialect acoustic description of vowels: Brazilian and European Portuguese.
This paper examines four acoustic correlates of vowel identity in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP): first formant (F1), second formant (F2), duration, and fundamental frequency (F0). Both varieties of Portuguese display some cross-linguistically common phenomena: vowel-intrinsic duration, vowel-intrinsic pitch, gender-dependent size of the vowel space, gender-dependent duration, and a skewed symmetry in F1 between front and back vowels. Also, the average difference between the vocal tract sizes associated with /i/ and /u/, as measured from formant analyses, is comparable to the average difference between male and female vocal tract sizes. A language-specific phenomenon is that in both varieties of Portuguese the vowel-intrinsic duration effect is larger than in many other languages. Differences between BP and EP are found in duration (BP has longer stressed vowels than EP), in F1 (the lower-mid front vowel approaches its higher-mid counterpart more closely in EP than in BP), and in the size of the intrinsic pitch effect (larger for BP than for EP).
Escudero
Paola
P
Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. paola.escudero@uva.nl
Boersma
Paul
P
Rauber
Andréia Schurt
AS
Bion
Ricardo A H
RA
D000293:Adolescent; D001938:Brazil; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011174:Portugal; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult