The present Doctoral Thesis in Linguistics aims to provide an acoustic description of the middle pretonic vowels / e / and / o / in Portuguese spoken in the urban area of the City of Cametá/PA. As specific objectives, we sought to: a) verify the possible influences of social factors such as gender, age group and education on the variation of the pretonic mean vowels; b) to verify if the phenomenon of vowel harmony favors the process of variation of the target vowels in the variety of Cametá/PA; c) provide the acoustic space of the target vowels under analysis, according to the parameters of F1 (tongue height), F2 (anteriority/posteriority); d) to investigate the role of F0 (fundamental frequency), F3 (roundness of the lips) and Duration in the acoustic characterization of the pretonic middle vowels in the studied variety. For that, the methodological procedures adopted were those established by Cruz (2011) in the acoustic characterization of the pretonic vowel system of Portuguese spoken in the Paraense Amazon: a) standardized corpus - with 45 words selected based on the context of high variability in previous sociolinguistic studies; b) sample stratified socially in sex, age group and education; c) data collection using the text reading protocol aloud (Y); d) segmentation of data in Praat; e) application of the Praat Analyzer Tier script to obtain the acoustic measurements taken from the central part of the target vowels; f) organization of the values of the physical parameters in Excel; g) statistical treatment by means of the R program. The results presented are the treatment of the 789 data from the data collection protocol through the reading of text (Y), contemplating the 18 (eighteen) sound signals referring to the sample. The sociolinguistic analysis showed the predominance of the medium variants, both of the anterior (75%) and the posterior (60%). Then, the low variants: 15% for the former, and 27% for the latter; and finally, the high variants: 10% of the former, and 13% of the latter. As for the social factors analyzed, schooling proved to be the most interfering factor in the variation of the vowels under study, as it was found that the higher the level of education, the greater the likelihood of performing the medium variants, and the lower the probability of high variants, confirming, therefore, that the schooling process in the municipality of Cametá tends to erase dialect marks. The acoustic analysis, in turn, from the joint analysis of F1 and F2, confirms that it is the most compact pretense vocalic system in Cametá and with a greater tendency towards centralization, as attested by Lages (2017) and Verçosa (2018). Vowel harmony was confirmed by tests of significance as a phonological process favoring vowel variation. With regard to F0 and F3, these are confirmed as parameters of identity between the variants, precisely because they present very close frequencies, thus allowing the realization of the same phoneme at the underlying level to be considered. The duration, in turn, was considered more than a distinctive parameter of vowels, since it can also be taken as an identity parameter between the variants of the vowels in a pretonic context.
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