This paper presents the results of three perceptual experiments investigating the role of auditory and visual channels for the identification of statements and echo questions in Brazilian Portuguese. Ten Brazilian speakers (five male) were video-recorded (frontal view of the face) while they produced a sentence (“ Como você sabe”), either as a statement (meaning “ As you know.”) or as an echo question (meaning “ As you know?”). Experiments were set up including the two different intonation contours. Stimuli were presented in conditions with clear and degraded audio as well as congruent and incongruent information from both channels. Results show that Brazilian listeners were able to distinguish statements and questions prosodically and visually, with auditory cues being dominant over visual ones. In noisy conditions, the visual channel improved the interpretation of prosodic cues robustly, while it degraded them in conditions where the visual information was incongruent with the auditory information. This study shows that auditory and visual information are integrated during speech perception, also when applied to prosodic patterns.
The aim of this paper is to compare the multimodal production of questions in two different language varieties: Brazilian Portuguese and Mexican Spanish. Descriptions of the auditory and visual cues of two speech acts, assertions and questions, are presented based on Brazilian and Mexican corpora. The sentence “Como você sabe” was produced as an yes-no (echo) question and an assertion by ten speakers (five male) from Rio de Janeiro and the sentence “Apaga la tele” was produced as a yes-no question and an assertion by five speakers (three male) from Mexico City. The results show that, whereas the Brazilian Portuguese and Mexican Spanish assertions are produced with different F0 contours and different facial expressions, questions in both languages are produced with specific F0 contours but similar facial expressions. The outcome of this comparative study suggests that lowering the eyebrows, tightening the lid and wrinkling the nose can be considered question markers in both language varieties.
Resumo: Este trabalho tem como objetivo descrever diferenças entre variedades dialetais do português falado em Salvador, Fortaleza e Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, tanto nas sentenças declarativas quanto nas interrogativas. A análise de parâmetros prosódicos (frequência fundamental, duração, intensidade) é feita no núcleo final de sentenças oxítonas, paroxítonas e proparoxítonas. Há diferenças prosódicas sistemáticas entre as duas modalidades (declarativa e interrogativa): um tom alto ou subida de F0 no núcleo das interrogativas e, ao contrário, um tom baixo ou descida de F0 no núcleo das declarativas. Variações dialetais também são observadas. Os acentos tonais nucleares H + L*L% para as declarativas e L + H*L% para as interrogativas, propostos por Moraes (2008), são observados nos falantes do Rio de Janeiro -sendo este último truncado ou comprimido
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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.