Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese Pronunciation The Mainstream Pronunciation of Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, From Sound Segments to Speech Melodies

This book contrasts variations in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation, using as a reference for discussion the mainstream careful speech of news anchors at the national level or the equivalent type of speech: a well-educated style that nonetheless sounds natural. Pursuing an innovative approach, the book uses this view of language as a cornerstone to describe and discuss other social and regional variants relative to that speaking register. It is aimed at speakers of Spanish interested in learning Portuguese and speakers of Portuguese who want to learn Spanish, as well as language specialists interested in bilingualism, heritage languages, in the teaching of typologically similar languages in contrast, and readers with interest in Phonetics and Phonology. The book employs a variety of innovative approaches, especially the reinterpretation of some of the traditional concept in Phonetics, and the use of speech prosodies and speech melodies, a user-friendly strategy to describe speech prosody in languages and speech melody in music through musical notation.

Acknowledgments.- Preface.- Introduction.- Phonetics and Phonology: The Basics.- The Physics, Articulation, and Perception of Speech Sounds.- Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese: History and Regional Varieties.- Speech Prosody.- The Sound Segments of MSp and MBP.- Spanish and Portuguese Consonants.- Speech Transcriptions: Spanish and Portuguese.- Speech Prosody and Speech Melodies.- Appendix.- Bibliography.- Glossary.- General Index.

Professor Simões is a leading specialist in contrastive studies of Portuguese and Spanish. He has published pioneering works in this area, especially the well-known textbook Pois não - Brazilian Portuguese Course for Spanish Speakers, used in language programs across the US and abroad for a varied audience of speakers of Spanish, heritage speakers, and people interested in bilingual studies, among others. Currently, Professor Simões’ research work focuses on the speech prosody of these two languages with an extended interest in other languages.  His method of analysis is based on data collected from speech transcriptions using musical notation of spontaneous speech.