Modeling the intonation of narrow focus in Brazilian Portuguese

• Grant number: 24/05665-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: November 01, 2024
• End date: October 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Plinio Almeida Barbosa
• Grantee: Gustavo de Campos Pinheiro da Silveira
• Supervisor: Dr Martine Lindsey Grice
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Cologne (UoC), Germany
• Associated to the scholarship: 23/06270-1 - Coordination between melodic and rhythmic patterns: a dynamical model of Brazilian Portuguese prosody, BP.DR

Abstract

This project proposes a 12-month research internship at the University of Cologne under the supervision of Professor Martine Grice, an intonation specialist. Our doctoral research in Brazil aims to model the interplay between syllable duration and fundamental frequency (F0) during information and contrastive narrow focus in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We intend to expand Barbosa's (2007) coupled oscillators model of speech rhythm by incorporating an F0 production mechanism that interacts with the current syllabic production oscillatory mechanism, making the model capable of emulating the coordination between F0 and syllable duration under narrow focus in this language. For the internship abroad, our goal is to test three influential F0 generation models by applying them to narrow focus intonation in BP: the Fujisaki model (Fujisaki & Hirose, 1984), the PENTA model (Xu, 2005), and the SFC model (Bailly & Holm, 2005). A controlled corpus with recordings of eight BP speakers, especially designed for the analysis of informational and contrastive focus, will be divided into two non-overlapping subsets: a training set and a testing set. The training set will be utilized for parameter extraction using computational tools. Subsequently, the models will be fine-tuned with these parameters to synthesize F0 curves from the recordings in the testing set. Finally, each model's ability to predict the original F0 patterns observed in the testing set will be evaluated using statistical techniques. By comparing these models applied to BP, we seek not only to assess their predictive power but also to consider aspects such as linguistic and biological plausibility, theoretical assumptions, among others. The knowledge about F0 modeling to be acquired during the internship will have a significant impact on enhancing the melodic component of Barbosa's coupled oscillators model (2007), directly contributing to our doctoral research in Brazil.