Identification and discrimination of English unreleased voiceless stops: data from Brazilian learners

Abstract

This study investigates how Brazilian EFL learners, living in Porto Alegre (RS), perceive the differences in place of articulation of the American English unreleased voiceless stops [p¬], [t¬], and [k¬], in word-final position. Thirty-two undergraduate students (leveled as having basic and intermediate proficiency In English), taking their English major at UFRGS, participated in the research study. In order to verify the perceptual accuracy regarding the place of articulation of the consonants, two psycholinguistic tasks containing CVC words (whose nuclear segments were represented by front vowels) were conducted. The results suggest that: (a) the segments [p¬] and [k¬] are perceived much more accurately than the segment [t¬]; (b) there were higher levels of accuracy in the tasks when the nuclear segment was a short/lax vowel; and (c) the participants’ level of proficiency is not crucial to the perceptual accuracy of the consonants which were tested.