Aprendizagem e atrito em interrogativas totais de bilíngues brasileiros em espanhol L2

Abstract

This study conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the occurrence of learning and attrition phenomena in bilingualism, using Brazilian Portuguese as L1 and Peninsular Spanish as L2 as the linguistic pair, and examining the intonational contours of yes-no questions produced by three groups of speakers: monolingual Brazilians with no knowledge of Spanish, monolingual Spaniards with no knowledge of Brazilian Portuguese, and bilingual Brazilians who have Spanish as their L2. The analysis drew on data collected — and qualitatively analyzed by Silva and Arantes (2022) — from the three groups of speakers reading excerpts from the adaptation for adolescents of the book Don Quijote de La Mancha. In previous studies (Silva, 2016; Silva and Arantes, 2022a; Silva and Arantes, 2022b), three types of utterances were considered: declarative,wh-questions, and yes-no questions. For this study, the focus is on the latter type. The sentence to be analyzed is “¿Amigo Sancho, tienes miedo?” in Spanish and its translation into Portuguese, “Amigo Sancho, tens medo?”. Based on the results of the undamental frequency (f0) contours obtained in the studies by Silva and Arantes (2022a) using the Praat software, it is observed that Spanish speakers produce a rising contour on the word carrying the nuclear stress, whereas Brazilians produce the contour traditionally described as “circumflex”, in which there is an initial rise aligned with the nuclear stress syllable and a fall aligned with the post-stressed syllable. With regard to bilingual speakers, three groups were observed: a first group that replicates the same contours as native Spanish speakers in their L2 production; a second group that transfers the intonational features of Portuguese to the L2; and a third group that ends up blending the other two types. The results obtained revealed low occurrence of attrition in Portuguese, that is, most of the speakers replicated the typical Brazilian Portuguese pattern. The data were then quantitatively analyzed using the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) technique to determine the distance between pairs of f0 contours. Based on this analysis, it was possible to observe that the contours transferred from L1 to L2 show greater variability than those found in the L1 of Brazilian monolinguals and that the qualitatively typical L1 contours are quantitatively more variable than those produced by native Brazilians.