The style variation in different reading situations: Capixaba variety

Abstract The style, along with linguistic and social resources, integrates the study of sociolinguistic variation. Based on W. Labov perspective, who mainly focused on the attention that the speaker pays to his/her own speech when he analysed stylistic variation, this research aims to observe possible stylistic differences between sentence reading (type “Digo palavra baixinho”) and text reading (type children's tale). The parameters analysed for such purposes are the frequencies of the first an second formants (F1 and F2) of stressed and pre-stressed vowels, the duration of those vowels (Dur) and their spectral emphasis (SE). The result confirmed that different styles promote different reactions in readers: the decontextualized sentences reading produced a more monitored speach than the text reading.