Formalização fonético-fonológica da interação de restrições na percepção da epêntese vocálica no português brasileiro

The present article aims to propose a formalization for the vowel epenthesis phenomenon, with the support of the Bidirectional Processing Model of L1 - BiPhon (Boersma (2006, 2007, 2008, 2010) and Boersma; Hamann (2009)), in word-mid contexts of heterosyllabic consonant clusters, from an empirical/acoustic and formal/phonological analysis. The present study focuses on the formalization of the perception of words formed by the heterosyllabic sequences /pt/, /pn/, /tn/ ('apnea', 'ethnicity', 'rapture') in Brazilian Portuguese, in a phonological model of linguistic analysis that combines the capacity of comprehension and production of human speech and that, despite presenting multilevel processing and dealing with a new type of constraints (cue constraints) that is not predicted in the Standard OT model, shows a similar evaluation process. From the proposed study, it was possible to resume the debate on the relationship between perception and phonology, assuming that perception is phonological, as well as the discussions on the bidirectionality of the cue and faithfulness constraints and the use of structural constraints, both in perception and production. Investigating a variable phenomenon in Brazilian Portuguese makes an important contribution that can enrich discussions on language variation and change, besides favoring theoretical investigations that propose to establish relations between languages or to discuss cases of linguistic borrowings.