Perception and Production of Word-Final Alveolar Stops by Brazilian Portuguese Learners of English

This paper focuses on the perception and production of the English alveolar stops (/t/ and /d/) in syllable coda by Brazilian learners of English. In the production test, the participants read a list of English sentences containing alveolar stops in word-final position. The preceding and following phonological contexts were controlled, so that the effect of context on the production of the alveolar stops could be analyzed. The perception test consisted of an oddity discrimination task where the target obstruents were either unreleased, aspirated, palatalized or produced with a paragogic vowel. The results of the production investigation show that the learners tended to unrelease the obstruents, but several tokens were aspirated, palatalized or produced with a paragogic vowel. As regards the relationship between perception and production of word-final /t/ and /d/, a positive correlation was found between the discrimination and production rates.