Brazilian Portuguese intonation: A comparison between automatic and perceptual analyses

Abstract

The present work aims to determine the most appropriated automatic analysis of phrasal intonation patterns in Brazilian Portuguese, understood as the variation of F0. In order to evaluate the automatic analysis done by the software ExProsodia a perceptual analysis was carried out and its results were compared to the ones given by the software. The corpus consisted of one sentence produced three times by 11 female subjects. In the perceptual analysis an intuitive evaluation was done considering the syllabic nuclei as intonation units (control group). The data from the automatic analysis were analyzed in three different ways: i) the cumulative mean of all points of intonation curve; ii) the cumulative mean of points higher than 0Hz; iii) and the cumulative mean of the points selected by ExProsodia. The acoustic parameters considered for the automatic analysis were: F0- from 50Hz to 700Hz; duration- from 20ms to 600ms; intensity- higher than 10% of RMS mean of intonation curve. A Dunnett's test compared the control group with other groups from the automatic analysis (α = 95%, n = 33). In the comparison between the control group and i & ii, it was obtained p < 0.05. It was verified that the units established by the interval given by ExProsodia (iii) were the only ones that showed no significant differences when compared to the control group. The results indicate a similarity between the automatic and perceptual analyses. The automatic analysis done by ExProsodia seems thus trustworthy.

Alvos tonais: unidades fonético-fonológicas da entoação

“…A forma fonológica, por nós citada, era um produto derivado da análise estatística de unidades menores, chamadas de UBI por Ferreira-Netto et al (2012) e organizadas na forma de uma série temporal. Naquela análise, levamos em consideração a média dos valores de F 0 , convertidos em semitons, para cada uma dessas unidades, que serão melhor definidas no capítulo 2.…”