Abstract
This paper is an acoustic phonetic analysis of English consonants, vowels, and suprasegmentals produced by the second author. It was carried out in the spring of 2015 in the first author’s acoustic phonetics class. Students recorded themselves at the beginning of the semester and analyzed their speech acoustically throughout the semester. They created acoustic portfolios that consisted in 10 individual projects. The main objective of the course is to initiate students to the techniques of acoustic phonetic measurements within the Speech Intelligibility framework, which espouses the view that intelligibility can be measured acoustically. This portfolio was selected out of many for two reasons. First, the second author demonstrated proficiency in the acoustic phonetic measurement techniques. Secondly, her data gives us a window into some aspects of the acoustic phonetic characteristics of a Brazilian Portuguese-accented English idiolect. The second author is a female from the state of Maranhão, more precisely from the city of São Luís. She began learning English when she was 11 years old in Middle school. Her English teachers were all native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. She spent six months in Canada before moving to Minnesota. She had been living in the US for two and a half years at the time of these recordings and analyses.
Creative Commons License
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Faculty Supervisor
Dr. Ettien Koffi
Recommended Citation
Koffi, Ettien and Ribeiro, Lillian Duarte
(2016)
"An Acoustic Phonetic Portfolio of a Portuguese-Accented English Idiolect,"
Linguistic Portfolios: Vol. 5, Article 8.
Available at:
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/stcloud_ling/vol5/iss1/8
Author Bio
Ettien Koffi is a professor of Linguistics. He teaches the linguistics courses in the TESOL/Applied Linguistics MA program in the English Department at Saint Cloud State University, MN. He has written three linguistic books: Language Society in Biblical Times (1996), Paradigm Shift in Language Planning and Policy: Game Theoretic Solutions (2012), and Applied English Syntax (2015). He is the author of many peer-reviewed articles on various topics in linguistics. His primary area of specialization is at the interface between acoustic phonetics and phonology. He has extensive experience in emergent orthographies and in the acoustic phonetic and phonological description of dialect variation. He can be reached via email at: enkoffi@stcloudstate.edu.
Lillian Duarte Ribeiro is an undergraduate student at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, USA. Her major is English with a linguistic emphasis, and a minor in Spanish. She plans to get certified as a Portuguese-English and English-Portuguese translator/interpreter. Her future plans include going to graduate school for acoustic phonetics and/or phonology. Email: lilliandribeiro@hotmail.com.