Study of vibrant realization by deaf speakers of Brazilian Portuguese

PURPOSE:to investigate in deaf bilingual individuals, the realization of vibrants in stressed syllable-final, in stressed syllable-final or unstressed in the middle of the word, in two language contexts: carrier sentence and letter.METHODS:five deaf bilingual respondents we selected, 4 female and 1 male with severe and / or deep bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, without neurological, cognitive and motor impairment, and two listeners, 01 female and 01 male. The corpus employed was divided into two phases, carrier sentences and letter reading both containing the same words. The recordings were made in the studio at Instituto Nacional de Educação de Surdos. For the analysis of the duration parameter of selected segments (vibrant), broadband spectrograms from the program PRAAT were extracted. Data obtained were statistically treated.RESULTS:the results shown in Table 1 (realization of vibrant in final stressed syllable) and Table 2 (realization of vibrant at the end of the stressed syllable in the middle of the word) show no significant difference at the 5% level, in the time spent for the achievement of vibrant in both groups.CONCLUSION:even though data observed in both investigated groups are not statistically significant at 5%, it is noticed that there is a trend of significant difference when the descriptive level (p value) was between 0.05 and 0.10. In fact, besides the acoustic analysis, the perceptual revealed a trace of vibrant more differentiated in deaf than in the hearing individuals. The findings in this study are related in the literature.