On the robustness of some acoustic parameters for signalling word stress across styles in Brazilian Portuguese

This work aims at examining three classes of acoustic correlates of lexical stress in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) in three speaking styles: informal interview, phrase reading and word list reading. In the framework of an international collaboration, a parallel corpus was recorded in the three speaking styles with 10 subjects so far in each one of the following languages: Swedish, English, French, Italian, Estonian and BP. In BP, duration, F0 standard-deviation and spectral emphasis values for stressed vowels tend to be higher in comparison with vowel acoustic parameters in unstressed position. These three parameters are robust across styles, especially vowel duration, for which circa 50 % of the variance is explained by stress and speaking style factors. The parameters pattern according to stress level is very similar between interview and phrase reading styles, which points to a similar effectiveness of reading and spontaneous styles in uncovering the word stress acoustic correlates in BP.