As fricativas posteriores: caracterização articulatória e acústica do /r/ em onset silábico

Abstract

The present work is an initial outline of the articulatory and acoustic characterization of posterior fricatives in the syllabic onset position. There are few studies that use resources, such as acoustic parameters, to confirm the eighth hearing impressions of the production of later posterior fricatives (SILVA, 2002; REINECKE, 2006; RENNICKE, 2015). Thus, this work aims to present articulatory characteristics of posterior fricatives from ultrasound images and, later, to discuss two acoustic parameters: spectral peaks and amplitude. The sample of this study is composed of the recording of ultrasound videos of two informants from the city of Florianópolis. The corpus contains real words and pseudowords, in which we control the vowel context ([a, i, u]), and were repeated 5 times by each informant. For the analyses, we used the Articulate Assistant Advanced software, from which we observed the movements in each segment, and Praat for the acoustic analyses. The results of the images show constrictions in the velar and pharyngeal region, conditioned to the adjacent vowels: velar and pharyngeal occur only in the context of [a], while for the other contexts we find glottal. In our data, amplitude proved to be a significant parameter to distinguish posterior fricatives, and also spectral peaks are at higher frequencies for velars than for pharyngeals and follow the pattern of vowels for the glottals. However, we consider further studies necessary are needed for further generalizations.