Vowel harmony and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in two varieties of Brazilian Portuguese

ABSTRACT This work presents a study of Brazilian Portuguese pre-stressed vowels in penultimate, trisyllabic words with four informants, two from Campinas region (South-Eastern) and two from Recife (North-Eastern Brazil). A corpus of 58 familiar and unfamiliar words within carrier phrases evaluated the duration, F1 and F2 frequencies of pre-stressed and stressed vowels. The goal was to examine vowel harmony as a possible consequence of Vowel-to-Vowel anticipatory coarticulation. Results point to asymmetries of vowel harmony: its frequency is higher in familiar words; in Recife, the harmony with low and mid-low stressed vowels is more frequent; stressed /u/ triggers less harmony than the other stressed vowels and pre-stressed /e/ undergoes more harmony than pre-stressed /o/.