Attitudinal Patterns in Brazilian Portuguese Intonation: Analysis and Synthesis

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the prosodic manifestation of the following attitudinal states: consideration, despair, disappointment, irony, justification, obviousness, and uncertainty. The sentence O Carlos Alberto já sabe. [Carlos Alberto already knows it.] was pronounced by a subject, who tried to convey each of these attitudes. Afterwards, it was presented to 20 panelists, which were asked to identify the original intention of each enunciation. The test results showed that the attitudes were, in general, correctly identified. The acoustic analysis revealed that the attitudinal patterns make use of distinct prosodic parameters in their manifestation: some are linked to segmental duration, be it global or localized; in other cases, the decisive prosodic component is the fundamental frequency. Auditory tests using speech resynthesis turned it possible to evaluate the relative weight of the prosodic characteristics identified in the analysis.