INTONATION PATTERNS AS SPOKEN BY A SPEAKER FROM GRATINGUETÁ
Keywords:
AMPER Project, Brazilian Portuguese, prosody, intonation, declarative sentences, interrogative sentencesAbstract
This article is developed in the framework of AMPER (Atlas Multimédia Prosodique de l'Espace Roman) project for the Portuguese language, AMPER-POR. The aim is to analyze declarative and interrogative utterances taken from the Brazilian Portuguese corpus, recorded by a subject from Guaratinguetá, a town in the countryside of the State of São Paulo. With the use of PRAAT software, we segmented the vowels of each sentence and applied a script, developed by Albert Rilliard, to obtain acoustic measures for fundamental frequency (in Hz) duration (in ms) and intensity (in dB). We also measured manually the last word vowels’ formants frequency (in Hz) for each utterance. Furthermore, we checked the fundamental frequency (f0) peak alignment in relation to the vowel’s stressed syllable, as proposed by Kohler (2006). Differences were found between the affirmative and interrogative forms in terms of intonation patterns and alignment of f0’s peak concerning the utterances’ last word stressed vowel.