This paper describes our exploratory work in applying the Automatic ToBI annotation system (AuToBI), originally developed for Standard American English, to European Portuguese. This work is motivated by the current availability of large amounts of (highly spontaneous) transcribed data and the need to further enrich those transcripts with prosodic information. Manual prosodic annotation, however, is almost impractical for extensive data sets. For that reason, automatic systems such as Au-ToBi stand as an alternate solution. We have started by applying the AuToBI prosodic event detection system using the existing English models to the prediction of prominent prosodic events (accents) in European Portuguese. This approach achieved an overall accuracy of 74% for prominence detection, similar to state-of-the-art results for other languages. Later, we have trained new models using prepared and spontaneous Portuguese data, achieving a considerable improvement of about 6% accuracy (absolute) over the existing English models. The achieved results are quite encouraging and provide a starting point for automatically predicting prominent events in European Portuguese.
Abstract. This paper performs a global analysis of entrainment between dyads in map-task dialogues in European Portuguese (EP), including 48 dialogues, between 24 speakers. Our main goals focus on the acoustic-prosodic similarities between speakers, namely if there are global entrainment cues displayed in the dialogues, if there are degrees of entrainment manifested in distinct sets of features shared amongst the speakers, if entrainment depends on the role of the speaker as either giver or follower, and also if speakers tend to entrain more with specific pairs regardless of the role. Results show global entrainment in almost all the dyads, but the degrees of entrainment (stronger within the same gender), and the role effects tend to be less striking than the interlocutors' effect. Globally, speakers tend to be more similar to their own speech in other dialogues than to their partners. However, speakers are also more similar to their interlocutors than to speakers with whom they never spoke.
The present study aims to investigate intonation contours in phrase-final position, in a corpus of spontaneous and prepared unscripted presentations from teenagers (14-15 years old) and adults, collected in a school context. Taking into account the differences between phrasing levels (ToBI breaks 3 and 4), we show that the frequency of low/falling vs. high/rising contours -mainly (H+)L* L and (L+)H* H -varies across oral presentation types. Adults and teenagers follow distinct strategies, though cross-gender differences are also a source of variation. We interpret these changes as an adaptation effect to the speaking styles specifically required at school, which call for the speaker´s effort to speak clearly and to keep the listeners attention, and ultimately as "intelligibility-oriented" speaking style changes.
This paper investigates the correlation between the prosodic properties and pragmatic functions of affirmative constituents in adult-adult interactions in European Portuguese (CORAL corpus). 515 affirmative constituents produced in 460 answers, extracted from 11 dialogues between 12 speakers, were analyzed. Results show that: i) sim 'yes', ok and grunts are the most frequent affirmative constituents; ii) sim 'yes' is associated with all the communicative functions analyzed, agreement, auto positive and confirm, ok tends to occur with agreement, and grunts are mainly associated to auto positive; iii) affirmative constituents have different prosodic properties according to their pragmatic function: agreement and confirm show a similar behavior, being auto positive the most distinct function. Agreement and confirm are commonly uttered with (H+)L* L%, whereas auto positive is commonly uttered with L*+H / (L+)H* H%. When affirmative constituents co-occur in the same answer, there are evidences of tone copying between them. Correlations between constituents were also found in the following parameters: energy, pitch mean, maxima and minima, as well as pitch range. As for context-answer pairs, a pitch concord effect is also found between the pairs instruct-agreement and propositional question-confirm, although expressed in different degrees.
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