2pSCb16. Recognition of Portuguese vowels by Galician-speaking and
Spanish-speaking listeners. Sergio Feijo´o, Santiago Ferna´ndez, and
Ramo´n Balsa ~Departamento de Fı´sica Aplicada, Universidad de Santiago
de Compostela, 15706 Santiago, Spain,
fasergio@usc.es
Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish are three romanic languages spoken
in the Iberian peninsula. Galician and Portuguese are historically related
and keep the same vocalic system of common latin: a, }, e, i, Å, o, u. In
Spanish the number of vowels was reduced to five: a, e, i, o, u. Nevertheless,
Spanish has exerted considerable influence on Galician, contributing
to weaken the vocalic contrasts }–e and Å–o. The purpose of these experiments
was to assess how Galician- and Spanish-speaking listeners perceived
the vocalic system of Portuguese. Stimuli were pV syllables pronounced
in a carrier phrase, where V was one of the seven vowels. Results
show that Galician-speaking listeners have some difficulty in perceiving
the contrasts }–e and Å–o, probably due to the historical influence of
Spanish, and despite the fact that F1 and F2 of the Portuguese vowels
were similar to those reported for Galician vowels. Spanish-speaking listeners
identified }–e as a single vowel e, and Å–o as a single vowel o,
associating the L2 vocalic inventory to their own vocalic system. Discussion
is based on the acoustic characteristics of vowels in those languages.
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