Duration aspects of prosodic focus marking in Brazilian Portuguese

• Grant number: 21/07754-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2021
• End date: July 31, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Geovana Carina Neris Soncin Santos
• Grantee: Pedro Ivo Ribeiro Pinheiro
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências (FFC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Marília. Marília , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 20/10144-3 - Prosody production and perception in children with typical and atypical phonological development, AP.JP

Abstract

In different languages, duration is a relevant phonetic-acoustic parameter for prosodic boundary marking (OLLER, 1973; KLATT, 1976; EDWARDS and BECKMAN, 1988; WIGHTMAN et al, 1992, among others). It is known that duration of segments from word that immediately precedes a prosodic boundary tends to be longer in comparison with segments from words that are not close to the border. This phenomenon is called pre-boundary lengthening in the international literature (GUSSENHOVEN AND RIETVIELD, 1998). For Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the pre-boundary lengthening has been studied by previous works in contexts of intonational phrase boundary in production of neutral sentences (MORAES, 1995; SERRA, 2009; SONCIN, 2018). In the case of sentences with narrow focus, little is known about the duration role since studies favor the description of intonation. These works consider that fundamental frequency is the main acoustic phonetic parameter for prosodic focus marking, as presented in detail inside the main research project (Proc. FAPESP 2020/10144-3). Therefore, this project aims to measure and describe duration of focused elements in comparison with duration of the same elements outside focus contexts in the typical adults speech (one of the subject's groups of the main research project). With that description, we aim to verify if, in this group of subjects, there would be differences in the duration of the elements depending on the contexts analyzed, namely: sentences with narrow and broad focus, in other words, sentences with prosodic focus and neutral sentences. (AU)