Russian Immigrants in Brazil

Henriques, Anna Smirnova; Fontes, Mario Augusto de Souza; Skrelin, Pavel A.; Kachkovskaia, Tatiana; Ruseishvili, Svetlana; Borrego, Maria Cristina de Menezes; Zuleta, Patricia Piccin Bertelli; Ferreira, Léslie Piccolotto; Madureira, Sandra

doi:10.25189/2675-4916.2020.v1.n2.id210

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 43 publications

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“…The speech material contained in the RusIm-Bra1 database is suitable for research of how Brazilian Portuguese is acquired as a second language by Russian L1 speakers; see e.g., the publications devoted to acquisition of segmental features (Smirnova Henriques et al 2019a, 2019b. Russian L1 speakers who contributed to the database took part in other related experiments such as verbal working memory assessment in Russian and Portuguese languages (Skorobogatova et al 2021), and evaluation of bilingual profiles.…”

Section: Introduction 1russophone Immigrants In Brazilmentioning

confidence: 99%

L1–L2 Influence in Intonation: A Case of Russophone Immigrants in Brazil

Kachkovskaia,

Lucente,

Smirnova Henriques

et al. 2024

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This paper is devoted to the features of sentence prosody (intonation) in Brazilian Portuguese spoken by immigrants whose first language is Russian, and explores the consequences that L1–L2 influence in intonation may have for communication. The study addressed four research questions: (1) Do Brazilian Portuguese L2 speakers with Russian L1 always succeed in producing the correct utterance type? (2) Can L1–L2 influence lead to misunderstanding of connotations? (3) Is it possible that sometimes L1–L2 influence leads to being perceived as too emotional or not emotional enough? (4) Can L1–L2 influence in intonation be a significant factor in the perception of accent? In a perceptual experiment, productions of four target utterances in Brazilian Portuguese by Russian L1 and Brazilian Portuguese L1 speakers were evaluated by 124 Brazilian listeners in terms of sentence type, possible connotations, accent and arousal. The target utterances included three questions of different types and an exclamation. The findings revealed that the speaker’s L1 influenced the perception of prosodic meanings by Brazilian listeners. In some cases, interference from Russian melodic contours caused the incorrect identification of the sentence type in Brazilian Portuguese. However, even when sentence type was perceived correctly, differences could be found regarding the perception of arousal or accent.

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Section: Introduction 1russophone Immigrants In Brazilmentioning

confidence: 99%

L1–L2 Influence in Intonation: A Case of Russophone Immigrants in Brazil

Kachkovskaia,

Lucente,

Smirnova Henriques

et al. 2024

Languages

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Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (BraPoRus) corpus: automatic transcription and acoustic quality of elderly speech during the COVID-19 pandemic

Sekerina,

Smirnova Henriques,

Skorobogatova

et al. 2023

Linguistics Vanguard

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This article presents the Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (BraPoRus) corpus, whose goal is to collect, analyze, and preserve for posterity the spoken heritage Russian still used today in Brazil by approximately 1,500 elderly bilingual heritage Russian–Brazilian Portuguese speakers. Their unique 100-year-old variety of moribund Russian is disappearing because it has not been passed to their descendants born in Brazil. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we remotely collected 170 h of speech samples in heritage Russian from 26 participants (M age = 75.7 years) in naturalistic settings using Zoom or a phone call. To estimate the quality of collected data, we focus on two methodological challenges, automatic transcription and acoustic quality of remote recordings. First, we find that among commercially available transcription programs, Sonix far outperforms Google Transcribe and Vocalmatic on the measure of word error rate (WER). Second, we also establish that the acoustic quality of the remote recordings was adequate for intonational and speech rate analysis. Moreover, this remote method of collecting and analyzing speech samples works successfully with elderly bilingual participants who speak a heritage language different from their dominant societal language, and it can become a new norm when face-to-face communication with elderly participants is not possible.

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perception of brazilian Portuguese open and close mid vowels by native Russian speakers

et al. 2020

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The perception of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) mid vowels is mainly investigated by foreign researchers who work with learners of Brazilian Portuguese, native speakers of English or Spanish. In Brazil, this field has been poorly explored. This work contributes to filling this gap by investigating the perception of two Brazilian Portuguese minimal vowel pairs in the group of 103 native Russian speakers and nine French speakers, most of them residing in Brazil. The test has been designed to evaluate the perception of the mid high and low front vowels [e] - [ε], and the mid high and low back vowels [o] - [ɔ]. The test is conducted online and includes 30 trials distributed in three types of tasks: image identification (8 trials), vowel identification (4) and word discrimination (18). It also contains a short sociolinguistic questionnaire. Our findings indicate that native Russian speakers do not differentiate the Brazilian Portuguese mid vowels very well: the mean percentage of the correct answers in the Russophone group was 68%, while in the French group it was 87% and in the Brazilian control group 99%. No correlation was found between the percentage of correct answers and residence time in Brazil or type of language instruction. As next steps, we plan to investigate the differentiation of the Brazilian Portuguese open and close mid vowels by Russophones at the level of production. We also intend to create a training corpus and develop strategies for perception training of the Brazilian Portuguese mid vowels, monitoring their efficiency at different time points.

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Russian Immigrants in Brazil

Cited by 6 publications

References 43 publications

L1–L2 Influence in Intonation: A Case of Russophone Immigrants in Brazil

L1–L2 Influence in Intonation: A Case of Russophone Immigrants in Brazil

Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (BraPoRus) corpus: automatic transcription and acoustic quality of elderly speech during the COVID-19 pandemic

perception of brazilian Portuguese open and close mid vowels by native Russian speakers

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