The importance of word-final vowel duration for non-native portuguese speaker identification by means of Support Vector Machines

Abstract

This article studies the acoustic characteristics of some oral vowels in tonic syllables of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and which acoustic features are important for classifying native versus non-native speakers of BP. We recorded native and non-native speakers of BP for the purpose of the acoustic analysis of the vowels [a], [i], and [u] in tonic syllables. We analyzed the acoustic parameters of each segment using the Support Vector Machines algorithm to identify to which group, native or non-native, a new speaker belongs. When all of the variables were considered, a precision of 91% was obtained. The two most important acoustic cues to determine if a speaker is native or non-native were the durations of [i] and [u] in a word-final position. These findings can contribute to BP speaker identification as well as to the teaching of the pronunciation of Portuguese as a foreign language.