Universidade Católica Portuguesa. Faculdade de Filosofia de Braga
Abstract
Linguistic studies (Barbosa, 1965 and 1994; Gonçalves, 2008; Martinet, 1985) suggest
that the spoken speech in the north of mainland Portugal shows a particular phonetic
variation characterized by the dominance of the variant [a] in all contexts in which the
vowel occurs in stressed and open syllable. In view of this theoretical assumption, this
paper reports the results of an acoustic study aimed at examining the phonetic realizations
of vowel /a/ and identify which of the variants ([a] or [ɐ]) characterizes the speech
of the city of Braga. To test the hypothesis on the predominant occurrence of the open
vowel ([a]) in this city, the realizations of the target vowel (/a/) adjacent to nasal and oral
consonants were acoustically analyzed in terms of the spectral quality by measuring the
frequencies of the first two formants (F1 and F2). Furthermore, given that level of education
is likely to be a determining factor in the phonetic realization of vowel /a/ (Rodrigues,
2003; Votre, 2004), we analyzed the speech production of two groups of informants with
different levels of education (basic education and higher education). Our results show
that in Braga’s speech the production of vowel [a] tends to occur in all studied contexts
and that level of education had no effect on the productions of /a/ since the two groups of
informants with different levels of schooling tended to show similar formant configurations
in the production of [a] and [ɐ]. Finally, our results suggest that the phonetic variant
that characterizes Braga’s speech is in fact the open vowel [a]
