A produção e percepção do acento em pares mínimos de língua inglesa por aprendizes brasileiros

Abstract

The study aimed at investigating the production and perception of English minimal pairs in a group of Brazilian students of English as a foreign language, equally divided in three different proficiency levels in order to verify which linguistic and social factors could be responsible for the mispronunciation of those lexical items. The stress pattern production was evaluated through reading activities and sentence repetition. The perception of the participants was measured through stress and categorical discrimination activities. It was expected that the linguistic proficiency level would be directly proportional to the amount of correct answers per test, which was partially confirmed, for the results revealed that, in some cases, the learner’s proficiency level is not the only factor responsible for determining the success in stress attribution and vowel reduction, but the amount of hours each one had before studying in the institution where the corpus was collected. Another hypothesis of the research considered that success in the production of the minimal pairs would be a result of a satisfactory perception of those same pairs. However, this hypothesis was not confirmed because the amount of correct answers in the production tests did not accompany the quantitative results of the perception tests, what revealed that learners’ capacities to perceive stress shift and determining the lexical category are more than satisfactory. The production tests presented an excessively reduced number of correct utterances in vowel reduction, which is a fundamental feature for the intelligibility of some minimal pairs. The social variables did not interfere at all with the minimal pairs stress production.