Relating acoustic measures to supralaryngeal adjustments of voice quality in Brazilian Portuguese

• Grant number: 24/17525-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: December 01, 2024
• End date: November 30, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Pablo Arantes
• Grantee: Tiago Zanoni Carvalho
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project proposes to analyze the correlation between acoustic parameters and supralaryngeal adjustments of voice quality according to the Vocal Profile Analysis (VPA) protocol, with the aim of contributing to ongoing postdoctoral research. The general objective of this research is to analyze acoustic correlates of voice quality and their applicability in Forensic Phonetics. Voice quality results from both laryngeal and supralaryngeal activities and tends to manifest in all sounds produced by a speaker. It is an almost permanent auditory quality, determined by a combination of physiological characteristics of the vocal tract, as well as idiosyncratic and/or socially acquired traits by speakers. This highlights its indexical nature, making it a fundamental object of analysis in both Sociophonetics and Forensic Phonetics investigations. The analysis will be based on 100 speech samples from the Brazilian Portuguese Forensic Corpus (CFPB), which are geographically stratified and previously analyzed from a perceptual-auditory perspective using the VPA protocol. Frequency values of the first four formants in open and semi-open vowels will be measured using the acoustic analysis software PRAAT. The correlation between acoustic parameters and judgments of the degree of presence of voice quality adjustments will be analyzed through statistical regression analysis, with acoustic parameters as predictor variables and supralaryngeal voice quality adjustments as response variables.