A perceptual evaluation of paralinguistic and extralinguistic features in the speech of members of a community of practice: a perceptual sociophonetic experiment

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the impressions of a group of listeners, the research judges, based on the characteristics of the caiçara speech accent by means of the application of a semantic differential questionnaire, which contains paralinguistic and extralinguistic descriptors referring to psychological, social and cultural physical and economic attributes. It is, therefore, a sociophonetic perceptive study that comprises a production task and a perception task and applies multidimensional statistical analysis to correlate quantitative and qualitative data. The results indicate that the speech of the caiçara community was considered unpleasant by the judges of all places and caused no strangeness or misunderstanding. The results of the application of the multidimensional analysis test, considering only the statistically  significant variables, showed that the caiçaras speakers were judged based on the perception of their speech, as people who perform manual work, have a bad financial situation, are unsuccessful, naive, simple and humble.