A aparente ausência de vogais postônicas mediais na variedade de São Carlos (SP)

This study has two goals: (i) to identify possible factors favoring the apparent absence of non-final post-stressed vowels in antepenultimate stress words (when there are not evident visual cues in the oscillogram and spectrogram) and (ii) to verify possible evidences in favor of the hypothesis that cases of apparent absence of non-final post-stressed vowels with fricative consonants preceding these vowels can be interpreted as realizations of non-final post-stressed vowels totally covered by the noise of the consonants. To fulfil the goals, the Articulatory Phonology framework was used, and speech data were collected from two experiments of oral word production. The experiments were applied to native speakers from the Paulista town of São Carlos.