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16 - Perception and Production of English and Portuguese Voiceless Stops by Heritage Learners

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2024

By
Anabela Rato  and
Vanina Machado
Edited by
Rajiv Rao
Rajiv Rao
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

This study analyzed the production and perception of Portuguese and English voiceless stops by twelve heritage learners of European Portuguese. Data were collected through two pseudoword reading tasks, a cross-linguistic rated dissimilarity task, and a cross-language perceptual assimilation task. The results show that Canadian English–European Portuguese bilinguals did not perceptually distinguish between aspirated and plain voiceless stops. However, the acoustic analysis revealed that they produced a significant language-specific difference between English aspirated and Portuguese unaspirated voiceless stops. Individual variation was observed in the categorization and production of heritage Portuguese plain stops and correlated with language use and perceived accent ratings.

Keywords

accent ratingacoustic analysisaspirationCanadian EnglishEuropean Portugueseperceptionvoiceless stops
Type
Chapter
Information
The Phonetics and Phonology of Heritage Languages , pp. 343 - 360
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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