Reading effects over the production of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) mid-vowels by speakers of Spanish

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of task type on vowel dispersion and Mahalanobis distance in the production of Brazilian Portuguese mid vowels by 10 native speakers of Spanish (5 males and 5 females) residing in Brazil. The participants completed two tasks: a card task and a list task, with the latter requiring more focused speech monitoring due to the reading effects. The selection of target words was based on acoustic parameters to avoid phonological context interference in F1 and F2 values. The words were pairs of morpheme alternates in Brazilian Portuguese, triggered by the following morphophonological processes: verbal inflection, metaphonic plural formation, gender inflection, suffixation, and abbreviation/truncation. Multiple linear mixed-effects regression models were applied to examine how vowel dispersion varied according to task type. The results showed that, contrary to the research hypothesis, vowels exhibited greater dispersion in the list task. This increased variability is attributed to hyperarticulation, which tends to occur in tasks that require greater attention to speech production. In contrast, the low-mid front vowel /ɛ/ showed reduced dispersion in the list task, suggesting that more controlled tasks may lead to more stable vowel productions. The findings highlight the phonetic monitoring effects induced by reading tasks on vowel dispersion and the distance between mid vowels and the centroids of the high-mid vowels /e/ and /o/ in the productions of Spanish speakers, as low-mid vowels are not part of the Spanish phonological system. This study contributes to the understanding of how tasks and reading-induced monitoring impact L2 vowel production, offering insights for the development of effective L2 pronunciation training.