A dinâmica dos gestos articulatórios da líquida lateral palatal : dados de informantes ouvintes e de uma usuária de implante coclear

Abstract

Due to their linguistic, articulatory and acoustic characteristics, the lateral consonants are conceived as complex sounds. They promote curiosities, doubts and controversies (Ladefoged, 1986; SILVA, 1996 and ALBANO, 2001) in the academia, but it is scarcely investigated. In fact, descriptions of the palatal lateral approximant consonant, for example, are still rare in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), especially in atypical populations. This research aims to investigate the production of this consonant by people who received cochlear implant and adult speakers of Brazilian Portuguese as their mother tongue. The analysis was guided by the Gestual Phonology that conceives the phonology of the languages as a dynamic system. Ten adult subjects with ages between 20 and 25 years - 5 males and 5 females - and one female user of cochlear implant with the age 13 years had their oral production analyzed. The data were recorded by a digital recorder Zoom H4N model synchronized to an ultrasound, Mindray DP-6600 model. The samples were collected in two stages. First, images were displayed on a computer screen, whose names should be inserted in the gap of the vehicle phrase Digo (word) bem bonito – I say (…) pretty well. In the second, the same procedure was performed with logatomas. The totality of the corpus is of 3,420 items. The acoustic data were analyzed by Praat software version 3.5.77 (BOERSMA & Weenink, 2007), and for the articulatory data was used AAA Software (WRENCH, 2012). The data were also submitted to statistical analysis using SPSS software. The results agree with those obtained by Silva (1996), it means: the three acoustic-articulatory phases of the consonant [x] were identified regarding the trajectory of the formants, as well as palatalization. Such acoustic facts demonstrate correlations with the obtained ultrasound images. The informant with cochlear implant articulated the consonant more slowly than listeners, but the acoustic aspects of her productions are similar to those informants. However, when we analyze the articulatory data it was detected a variability in palatalization of the consonant, a fact that was not detected for the listeners.