Description of duration in prosodic focus marking in children with typical phonological development

• Grant number: 21/07462-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Effective date (Start): August 01, 2021
• Effective date (End): December 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Geovana Carina Neris Soncin Santos
• Grantee: Cecília Lorena Silva Guida
• 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

The role of duration as a prosodic boundary marker is attested by international linguistic literature (OLLER, 1973; EDWARDS and BECKMAN, 1988; et. al.) and it was equally renowned by works from Brazilian Portuguese (BP) (MORAES, 1995; SERRA, 2009; SONCIN, 2018). Nevertheless, in descriptions of BP, studies rely on adults' speech. Then, little is known about duration in children's speech. It is not known, for example, whether in children's speech the pre-boundary lengthening would occur as it occurs in adult speech. Likewise, it is little known about which phonetic-acoustic parameters would be relevant for prosodic focus marking by children. Considering these gaps and the prospect that duration acts alongside other acoustic parameters for prosodic focus marking, such as fundamental frequency, this research project will measure and describe the duration of narrow-focus elements in speech of children with typical phonological development (one of the subject's groups of the main research project - FAPESP 2020/10144-3). With that description, we aim to verify if there would be differences in the duration of elements according to the contexts analyzed, namely: sentences with narrow and broad focus. (AU)