Estudo acústico das vogais t nicas em palavras paroxítonas do português falado no Rio Grande do Sul

This work is part of the doctorate research on the phonetic/phonologically aspects of the Portuguese spoken in Rio Grande do Sul, a topic that is part of a major project, i.e. Phonology of Portuguese, that aims to describe the Phonetic and Phonological aspects of different varieties of Brazilian Portuguese. The present paper characterizes, from the acoustic point of view, the stressed vowels in words stressed on the second to last syllable and pronounced by speakers form Rio Grande do Sul. To accomplish the task, we used the data collected with six speakers (four men and two women). The identification and depiction of the formantes was carried out according to Ladefoged (1971, 2001 e 2005) and Quilis (1988). The results showed that the vowels of this variety of Portuguese are organized in three groups: front vowels, high back vowels and low back vowels. Also, [a] is very low and [u] is centralized if compared to the other vowels.