Post-stressed vowel system of a Portuguese regional variety

Abstract

This work presents a phonologically and phonetically based description for Portuguese Beira Interior regional speech. In particular, the performance of a poststressed vowel system is shown. We also describe the solutions adopted to build a phonological-phonetic inventory. We explore the view that Quantal Theory and Optimality Theory can support the phonological representation of phone inventories, which could describe languages by using their frequency distribution and providing a feasible alternative to be incorporated in the development of speech systems. The resulting phone inventory is supported by statistical measures obtained from the analysis of an oral corpus. The major goal is to present the allophones which are more or less perceived in speech continuum in order to give a code with which an algorithm will match in a language model of Portuguese speech processing, including regional varieties. Our belief is that formalised knowledge of pronunciation variants will also be acquired by analysing very large amounts of data in the future and will ultimately contribute to improving Portuguese multi-pronunciation modelling, taking minority speech into account.