Effects of F0 movements, intensity, and duration in the perceptual identification of Brazilian Portuguese wh-questions and wh-exclamations

Abstract

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.

Visual channel facilitates the comprehension of the intonation of Brazilian Portuguese wh-questions and wh-exclamations: evidence from congruent and incongruent stimuli

“…For instance, Oliveira et al (2014), by manipulating the F0 contour of BP wh-questions and whexclamations, found out that, while stimuli with lower F0 on the nucleus were perceived as wh-questions, stimuli with higher F0 at the nucleus were recognized as wh-exclamations. Miranda et al (2022), in turn, applied a perceptual experiment with resynthesized stimuli to weigh the relevance of F0 movements versus duration and intensity patterns in the perceptual identification of speech acts. It is worth mentioning that, although the acoustic analysis of Miranda et al (2020b) indicated that there are significant differences between the two speech acts only in relation to the intensity parameter, the duration and intensity patterns of each intonational contour were analyzed in a combined manner in the authors' perceptual experiment, transplanting the melodic contour onto the rhythmic base of the wh-questions and wh-exclamations, an approach described, for example, by Moraes and Rilliard (2018) and already applied in other BP intonation patterns (Miranda et al, 2022(Miranda et al, , 2023.…”

“…Miranda et al (2022), in turn, applied a perceptual experiment with resynthesized stimuli to weigh the relevance of F0 movements versus duration and intensity patterns in the perceptual identification of speech acts. It is worth mentioning that, although the acoustic analysis of Miranda et al (2020b) indicated that there are significant differences between the two speech acts only in relation to the intensity parameter, the duration and intensity patterns of each intonational contour were analyzed in a combined manner in the authors' perceptual experiment, transplanting the melodic contour onto the rhythmic base of the wh-questions and wh-exclamations, an approach described, for example, by Moraes and Rilliard (2018) and already applied in other BP intonation patterns (Miranda et al, 2022(Miranda et al, , 2023. Results showed that BP listeners identified stimuli with a falling nuclear F0 movement along with the wh-question patterns of duration and intensity as wh-question, whereas stimuli with a falling F0 followed by a subtle rising nuclear F0 movement plus its duration and intensity patterns from the wh-exclamation contour were identified as wh-exclamation.…”