An Acoustic Investigation into the Prosodic Features of an American English and Brazilian Portuguese Idiom

Abstract

This article reports on an investigation, in an L2 context, of the use of acoustic phonetics to characterize the intonational patterns of an idiom in utterances produced by bilingual speakers (English and Portuguese). The study is mainly grounded on Bolinger´s Pitch Accent Model (1986;1989;1998) and on the experimental work conducted by Moraes (1998) and Rocca (2003;2007) for both Portuguese and English. The sentences were extracted from a dialogue, and the recordings were supervised in studio. The acoustic analysis of the speech productions was carried out by means of the PRAAT software program.