Prominence- and boundary-related acoustic correlations in brazilian portuguese read and spontaneous speech

Abstract

This work presents a function-oriented analysis of the interrelations between f0 and syllable-sized duration contours in Brazilian Portuguese read paragraphs and spontaneous speech aiming at: presenting measures of the frequency of prominencemarking and breaking-marking in BP, showing the interdependence between f0 and syllable-sized duration contours, showing the separate contributions of duration and f0 at minor prosodic boundaries, presenting a semi-automatic method for analysing the correlation between f0 and normalised syllablesized duration contours.Contrary to the observations in lab speech for isolated utterances, pitch accents are relatively frequent in BP (from 54 to 73 % of the phonological words).Peaks of syllable-sized duration signal both minor and major prosodic boundaries, having both a phrasal and a sentencial breakingmarking function, as well as a prominent-bearing function.