Use of vibrant in the acquisition of Portuguese as a foreign language by native American and Spanish speakers: implications for teaching

Abstract: Based on the theoretical postulations of Labov's Sociolinguistics, this study proposes to analyze the use of vibrant in the acquisition of the Portuguese as a foreign language by native Americans and Spanish speakers. For this purpose, it was selected types of bibliographical, field and analytics researches and, the speech from 11 American and 11 Spanish native speakers were divided in styles, which passes through informal to ones that are more formal. The results showed that the context, in which the informants use a phoneme in their native language, motivates its usage in learning Portuguese. The acquisition of phonemes of Portuguese is more rapid among the younger informants while the informant´s mother tongue structure usage is more common in informal speech styles.