Uma análise acústica da duração dos ditongos [ai] e [ei] no inglês americano e português brasileiro à luz dos sistemas adaptativos complexos

Abstract

This work aims at investigating the production of diphthongs [ai] and [ei] of Brazilian and American speakers, who have Portuguese and English as their L1 and L2, to observe similarities in the values of the diphthong durations obtained through acoustic analysis, from the perspective of a concept of language as a Complex Adaptive System. It is important to emphasize that this conception of language comes from the theorists studied in this work, as for example Larsen-Freeman (1997) and Beckner et.al. (2009). For this, we make a theoretical research about the phonic status of the diphthongs of both Portuguese and English, and we realized that the authors differ greatly in their use of terminology, as diphthong, a diphthongized vowel or a long vowel, especially in relation to [ei]. Results demonstrate the productions of the peakers with distinct values of duration of the diphthong, vowel and approximant, between Brazilians and Americans, but close, to demonstrate the influence of one language system on the other, that is, how Brazilian Portuguese influences English and vice versa. From this, we can consider Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) as a possible and useful language conception to think about the linguistic development of bilingual speakers.