Prosodic boundary perception in Brazilian Portuguese: phonetic cue investigation

• Grant number: 17/12453-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: October 01, 2017
• End date: March 31, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Luciani Ester Tenani
• Grantee: Geovana Carina Neris Soncin Santos
• Supervisor: Marc Swerts
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas (IBILCE). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de São José do Rio Preto. São José do Rio Preto , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Tilburg University, Netherlands
• Associated to the scholarship: 14/24778-3 - Prosodic organization and uses of comma: pauses and intonation contours in focus, BP.PD

Abstract

The aim of this project is to investigate the role of the duration of segments involved in tonal composition for the perception of intonational phrase boundaries. More particularly, the aim is to develop an experimental design which assesses, on one hand, whether the segment duration in contexts of prosodic boundary, combined with F0 variations, influences the perception of pauses and, on the other hand, whether a hierarchy could exist between the roles played by F0 variation and the segment duration in boundary contexts for the perception of pauses. Therefore, the experiment shall have paired sentences formed by the same segmental string, but contrasting to each other in terms of syntactic-semantic organization, which, in turn, is identified through the prosodic phrasing. With the obtained results, we aim to map how phonetic cues are related to each other in the perception of intonational phrase boundaries in Brazilian Portuguese and discuss theoretically how cognitive determinants act in the interpretation of the prosodic boundary as a silent pause in order to identify meanings in the sentences. (AU)