STUDY ON THE EPENTHESIS IN SPANISH IN BRAZILIAN STUDENTS’ PRODUCTION

Abstract

The following work studied the production of consonant clusters in Spanish from Brazilian students to examine if there would be vocalic epenthesis implementation, insertion phenomenon of a vowel between different syllable consonants. Cognate and non-cognate words in Portuguese and Spanish were considered to verify if there would be differences between the production of this words. It was also verified if there would be syllabic pattern influence from the native/mother language during foreign language production. Undergraduate students from the first and fifth semesters on the Portuguese/Spanish Language teaching course of the Federal University of Rio Grande participated in this study. The data production of these students was subjected to statistical analysis through GoldvarbX program (2005), that identified in which linguistic and extralinguistic contexts were more favoring of epenthesis completion. It was believed that the epenthesis implementation rate among students from the first semester would be higher than the phenomenon implementation rate among the students from the fifth semester due to lower contact with the target language of the initial level students. Against what was expected, however, the results showed a low percentage of the epenthesis phenomenon so that the students conserved the foreign language syllabic patterns during their production, keeping the consonant clusters and avoiding the vocalic segment insertion, regardless of the semester they were enrolled.