Quanto mais pior: considerações acerca da aquisição das vogais orais do Português Europeu por hispanófonos

Abstract

The motivation that led to this article is the need to know how Spanish speaking learners of Portuguese as Foreign Language (PFL), adapt their vocalic system to the Portuguese language. The departure hypothesis will be that some difficulties will appear due to the vocalic discrepancy between the number of phonemes of the Spanish language, 5 oral vowels and two semivowels, and the substantially higher number of vowels in the Portuguese language, 9 oral vowels, 5 nasal vowels and 2 semivowels. Through the recording of linguistic productions of Spanish as a mother tongue speakers and PFL, an experimental phonetic analysis of the three corpora was done. It consisted on the segmentation and measurement of the two first formants of the vowels analyzed, in order to be able to compare the two systems. It is interesting to observe how these speakers distribute the sound, along the acoustic triangle, of the Portuguese oral vowels that do not exist in Spanish. This is an important question and one to be taken into consideration when teaching Portuguese to Spanish speaking students.