Efeitos das máscaras faciais na palatalização de oclusivas alveolares na fala de universitários da Universidade Federal de Sergipe

Abstract

COVID-19 has brought about significant changes to society.The use of face masks is one of them, and according to Freitag and Tejada(2022), this use can establish changes in the language, implying linguisticcompensation. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of facial masks as acatalyst for the palatalization of consonants /t/ and /d/ (Souza 2016, Corrêa2019, Silva 2021). This study was conducted in two stages. The first stageused a sample of 17 sociolinguistic interviews from the Falares Sergipanosdatabase to obtain values for palatalization. In the second stage, 48 audiorecordings were recorded in an acoustic booth the 24, of which with masks.In the first stage, 2032 contexts of “te”, “ti”, “di”, and “de” were identified. Inthe second stage, 1,440 data points were selected, also with “te”, “ti”, “di”,and “de” contexts, for comparison with the results of the first stage. In thefirst stage, the palatal variant accounted for 27.13 % of all cases. In the secondstage, the palatal variant accounted for 40.14 % of the total; however, the useof face masks did not significantly influence palatalization.