Study of the prosodic organization of announcements of TV broadcasting from the Unicamp Universitary TV before and after broadcast training

Author(s)

Ana Carolina Constantini

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2010-04-11

Examining board members

Plinio Almeida Barbosa; Maria Bernadete Marques Abaurre; Lucia Figueiredo Mourão

• Advisor: Plinio Almeida Barbosa

Abstract

The objective of this work was the study of the rhythmic organization of announcements of TV broadcast from the Unicamp Universitary TV. Two students of journalism passed by vocal training workshops with a speech therapist. The vocal training workshops intended to improve phonoarticulatory aspects involved in journalistic announcement. The study of the rhythmic organization of the announcements was done by analyzing the duration of Vowel-to-Vowel Units (VV units) throughout the utterances before and after the training. These units reveal the rhythmic organization of announcements in Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP) and they include the acoustic segments that start at a vowel onset to the next vowel onset (Barbosa, 1994;1996; 2006). Besides duration, the relationship between the melodic contour and the duration of VV units (using the DaTo notation system by Lucente, 2007; 2008) was investigated too. Perceptual tests were applied to try to reveal how the strategies used by the subjects to read the announcement would be interpreted by the listeners. Another aspect studied was the relationship between prosody and syntax according to the Dependency Grammar (Tesnière, 1965) theory (DG theory) as used by (Barbosa, 2006) to investigate this relationship in BP. Results showed that the duration of specific VV units related to emphatic expression were higher in the utterances produced after training. These changes were located in stressed syllable position where the fundamental frequency also varies more in the case of particular emphasis. As to the relation with syntax, the most common DG marks founded were IDF (between utterances) and DfD (between a head and its right dependent). Results showed that after training the subjects became more expressive to read the announcement and they improve their knowledge about prosodic aspects that are involved in journalistic phonostyle (AU)