ABSTRACT
The French vowel system differs from the Portuguese one in terms of front rounded vowels – /y/, /ø/, /œ/ – found in French phonology, whose system has ten vowels, while the Portuguese one has seven vowel segments. The focus of this study is the acquisition of French front rounded vowels by Brazilian Portuguese (BP) native speakers. With the support of the Stochastic Optimality Theory (St OT) and the assumption that a foreign language acquisition process involves mainly the organization of a new grammar, this study was based on an empirical basis taken from Alcântara (1998)ALCÂNTARA, C. O processo de aquisição das vogais frontais arredondadas do francês por falantes nativos do português . 1998. Orientadora: Carmen Lúcia Matzenauer Hernandorena. Dissertação (Mestrado em Letras) – Universidade Católica de Pelotas, Pelotas, 1998. . It aims to describe and formalize the emergence of vowels /y/, /ø/, /œ/ in the phonology of French as a foreign language acquired by BP native speakers, in the light of Markedness and Faithfulness constraints, which integrate the Optimality Theory (OT), in the different stages that characterize the learning process of the L2 vowel system.
french acquisition front rounded vowels; foreign language acquisition; Stochastic Optimality Theory
