VARIABILITY IN BRAZILIAN LEARNERS’ ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION AND ITS EFFECT ON INTELLIGIBILITY

Resumo

Pronunciation features which characterise the prototypically Brazilian accent have been described in the literature for decades. These features, regarded as being predictable, are grouped into five categories: (1) word stress placement; (2) consonants; (3) vowels; (4) vowel insertion; and (5) spelling pronunciation. Due to linguistic variability, the predictability of features is questioned in this study, which has two aims: (1) to identify pronunciation features in spontaneous speech of Brazilian learners’ English unpredicted in the literature; and (2) to investigate the ways in which these features affect the pronunciation intelligibility of the Brazilian learners to British listeners. Data collected for a previous study (CRUZ, 2006) was revisited. Such data comprise samples produced by Brazilian learners containing predictable pronunciation features, presented to British listeners unfamiliar with the way Brazilians pronounce English words. The results reveal that the prototypically Brazilian accent presents more variability than what has been suggested in the literature, and that the unpredictable pronunciation aspects are likely to affect Brazilian learners’ intelligibility to British listeners.