João Antônio de Moraes’s research while affiliated with Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and other places

This pilot study reports on acoustic and perceptual profiles of two American female speakers’ productions of six American English social affective expressions: Authority, Declaration, Irritation, Sincerity, Uncertainty and walking on eggs as spoken in the linguistic sentence frame, Mary was dancing. The acoustic profile describes the prosodic characteristics of the utterances as a whole, as well as the voice quality characteristics of the nuclear stress syllable in the utterances. The perceptual profiles describe listeners’ 3 dimensional VAD emotional ratings, i.e., Valence, Arousal, and Dominance, of the utterances and listeners’ auditory impressions of the nuclear stress syllable. Multifactorial Analyses were applied to examine the relation between the prosodic characteristics and the VAD scales, and also the relationship between voice quality measurements on the nuclear stress vowel and auditory perceptions. The prosodic MFA results indicate that for these two American English speakers, a soft / noisy voice, with weak harmonics and irregular rhythm with pauses and hesitations, as in the expressions of Uncertainty and WOEG, is perceived by listeners as accommodating and not positive. Loud, tense voices with energy in the upper frequencies, as in theexpression of Irritation, are perceived as Aroused. Expressions of Authority, Declaration, and Sincerity tend to have comparatively regular rhythm and relatively flat intonation. The MFA analysis of voice quality measurements and auditory perceptions suggests that Normalized Amplitude Quotient may indeed be a good estimate for tense voice due to glottal closing behavior, Cepstral Peak Prominence, a good estimation for strong non-noisy harmonics, Peak Slope, a good estimate of spectral related tense voice, and Hammarberg Index, for distribution of spectral energy, i.e., strong or weak energy in the upper frequencies.

This paper presents an audiovisual perceptual analysis of the wh-question and wh-exclamation intonation in Brazilian Portuguese using auditory-visual congruent and incongruent stimuli, to investigate the relative importance of each modality in signaling pragmatic meanings. Ten Brazilian Portuguese speakers (five female) were filmed while producing both speech acts 10 times. Next, artificial stimuli were created: audio and visual cues were either matched (audio and video from the same speech act) or mismatched (audio and video from the different speech acts), resulting in 10 congruent and 10 incongruent stimuli of the wh-questions and the wh-exclamations. The perceptual experiment was taken by 36 Brazil-ians who identified the stimulus as a question or an exclamation. Results from the logistic regression showed that the factor 'congruence' was significant and had a significant interaction with 'speakers', which means that the congruent stimuli increased the comprehension of the Brazilian Portuguese wh-questions and wh-exclamations. In contrast, the incongruent stimuli tended to lower listeners' identification, but to a degree depending on individual speakers' strategies. Although variation in the accuracy of expressing both speech acts was also found across speakers, this study corroborates that the visual channel impacts the perceptual identification of the pragmatic intonation function of distinguishing sentence mode.

Este artigo apresenta os resultados de um estudo experimental sobre a asserção e a questão-eco que procurou estabelecer o papel relativo de parâmetros prosódicos (movimento melódico vs. intensidade e duração) no reconhecimento perceptivo desses contornos entonacionais. A mesma sentença (Como você sabe) foi enunciada com variações prosódicas ma-nifestando dois diferentes atos de fala-asserção e questão-eco-por dez falantes (5 homens) do Rio de Janeiro. Utilizando o Praat, os contornos de F0 desses dois atos de fala foram manipulados para avaliar o papel da (i) direção do movimento de F0 (ascendente ou descendente) e (ii) quais sílabas carregam informações sobre o valor funcional desses contornos. O papel da duração e da intensidade também foi testado. Em um experimen-to perceptivo, vinte e quatro ouvintes brasileiros julgavam se cada um dos estímulos que foram produzidos correspondia a uma declaração ou uma pergunta. Concluímos que uma pista prosódica relevante no português brasileiro para a distinção entre uma declarativa e uma questão-eco é o tipo de movimento de F0 na região nuclear, especialmente sobre a sílaba tônica final. Além disso, os padrões de intensidade e duração contribuíram para o reconhecimento do valor funcional desses contornos. Palavraschave: asserção, questão-eco, percepção, ressíntese, português brasileiro

This study presents a perceptual analysis of the Brazilian Portuguese wh-question and wh-exclamation intonational contours to discriminate their acoustic and perceptual features. The corpus of this study is composed of the sentence “Como você sabe” (“How do you know” vs. “How clever you are!”), which was produced with both speech acts. Two perceptual identification experiments were designed to assess the subjects’ ability to identify these speech acts based on their prosodic characteristics, as well as the perceptual relevance of specific prosodic cues in the recognition of wh-questions and wh-exclamations. The results of the first perceptual test indicated that Brazilian listeners can identify these two speech acts by intonation only, whereas the second test showed that F0, duration and intensity cues contribute to the perceptual identification of the speech acts. Stimuli with a falling F0 movement in the last stressed syllable tend to be interpreted as wh-questions, whereas stimuli with a slightly rising F0 movement tend to be judged as wh-exclamations. Keywords: intonation; perception; wh-question; wh-exclamation; Brazilian Portuguese

This paper aims at describing prosodic focalization as a multimodal phenomenon in Brazilian Portuguese, evaluating the role of two modalities in focus production and perception: audio (A), visual (V), and their combined audiovisual presentation (AV). Five focus types are considered, according to their semantic-pragmatic values: (a) in declarative sentences: (i) IF - informational focus (answer to a previous question, conveying new information), (ii) CF- contrastive (strong) focus (correction of information considered wrong); (iii) ATF - attenuated (weak) focus (proposition of an alternative solution to previous information); (b) in interrogative sentences: (i) INTF - interrogative focus (a new information is requested in the question); (ii) SF - surprise focus (one casts doubt on a previous information). Also, structural factors were evaluated, as focus extension and position in the sentence. After running a multimodal perceptual experiment and developing an acoustic and visual analysis on focus production, results show that multimodality plays a relevant role in focus production and perception. Different acoustic and visual parameters, or configuration of parameters, contribute to conveying distinct meanings, according to each focus type. Keywords: focalization; audiovisual prosody; Brazilian Portuguese

This paper aims at developing an experimental study about potential restrictions on identifying the length of focused structures in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Considering Broad Focus and Narrow Focus, we propose a continuum of focalization spans, based on the hierarchical prosodic domains presented in the Prosodic Phonology theory. Specifically, we analyze the intonation domains in BP, the phonological word (ω), and the phonological phrase (φ). After running a multimodal perceptual experiment, statistical results show that narrow elements are best identified than composed ones and that confusions present a systematicity in complex focused structures. As for modality, adding the visual modality does not increase (nor decrease) significantly the already high focus span identification. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis of selected melodic patterns allowed us to develop some relevant remarks about the focalization inscription in the prosodic structure of BP. Keywords: Focalization; Intonation; Prosodic Phonology; Brazilian Portuguese

The aim of this paper is to compare the multimodal production of assertions and questions in two different languages: Brazilian Portuguese and Mexican Spanish. Descriptions of the auditory and visual cues of these speech acts are presented based on Brazilian and Mexican corpora. The sentence "Como você sabe" was produced as an assertion and an echo question by ten speakers (five male) from Rio de Janeiro and the sentence "Apaga la tele" was produced as an assertion and a yes-no question by five speakers (three male) from Mexico City. The speech acts intonational patterns were described in terms of F0 movements and annotated in the nuclear region of the contours with ToBI system. Momentary facial muscular changes (namely Action Units) located in the upper and lower part of the face as well as head movements were used to analyze the facial expressions. The acoustic description showed that Brazilian Portuguese assertions are produced with a falling F0 nuclear configuration (H+L*L%) and echo questions with a rising F0 nuclear configuration (L+<H*L%). Mexican Spanish assertions present two types of F0 nuclear configurations, either a low flat nuclear F0 (L*L%) or a falling-rising (L+H*L%) nuclear F0, whereas Mexican Spanish yes-no questions are produced with a low nuclear F0 followed by a rising boundary tone (L*LH%). The outcome of the visual analysis indicates that, whereas Brazilian Portuguese assertions are visually produced with blink and right head tilt and Mexican Spanish assertions with lip stretcher, lowering the eyebrows, tightening the eyelid and wrinkling the nose can be considered question markers in both language varieties.