PRODUCTION OF ENGLISH INTERDENTAL FRICATIVES BY MULTILINGUAL SPEAKERS

Resumo

This study aimed to analyze the production of the English interdental fricatives /ð/ and /θ/ by multilingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, Polish and English. Learners of foreign languages commonly face challenges regarding different aspects of learning, when it comes to phonetics that factor is not different. In case of English, a common difficulty can be related to the interdental fricatives, especially when these phonemes are not part of the inventory of a learner’s first language, as is the case of the Brazilian Portuguese and Polish languages. Based on this assumption, the present study obtained five participants, descendants of Polish immigrants, originally from the Paraná and Santa Catarina states. The target sounds were embedded in English carrier words and then, analyzed acoustically with help of the Praat software. To collect the data, individual in-person meetings were scheduled. The participants also answered a background questionnaire, its objective was to gather personal information such as age, languages’ proficiency and age of acquisition. The results of the study demonstrated the emergence of the substitution of /ð/ and /θ/ by other phonemes, as appointed by the literature.