Automatic identification of synthetically generated interlanguage transfer phenomena between brazilian portuguese (L1) and english (L2)

Transfer phenomena between Portuguese (L1) and English (L2) produced by Brazilian learners are well documented in the literature. However, the identification and classification of these processes are made mainly through transcriptions, a slow and laborious process done by specialized linguists. The rapid identification of these phenomena would be of great value for software doing proficiency placement tests and could be used in language schools, distance education, computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) or by autodidacts and researchers. The present work analyzed possible techniques and tools that can be used in the automatic identification of some transfer processes. The data for the grapho-phonic-phonological transfer were synthetically generated in the Google Translate™ TTS system. Then we tested three classification algorithms to perform the identification: k-Nearest Neighbor, Centroid Minimum Distance, and Artificial Neural Networks. The results indicate that these techniques are of great value for Linguistics and for new software applications in language learning.

Quantitative analysis of fundamental frequency in Spanish (L2) and Brazilian Portuguese (L1)

This paper analyzes the intonation of Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) produced by monolingual speakers of both languages and bilingual BP speakers that lived in Spain on average for 6 years. Bilinguals produced data in both Spanish L2 (BL2) and BP L1 (BL1). Speech materials are sentences in different modalities (declaratives, yes-no and wh-questions) and reading styles (isolated sentences and storytelling). Fundamental frequency (f0) contours were analyzed to assess learning in Spanish L2 and language attrition in the L1 production of bilinguals. Variability in the f0 contours of the four language conditions was gauged by means of three indices (peak rate, peak range and global standard deviation). Dynamic time warping (DTW) distances between pairs of f0 contours were also measured as a way to measure within- and between-language differences in intonation patterns. The main results are: 1) BL2 and BL1 contours are significantly more variable than the monolingual ones both quantitatively and qualitatively; 2) BL2 contours partially converge towards the patterns of Spanish monolinguals, showing that there is learning; 3) there is evidence for language attrition in the form of transfer of Spanish patterns to BP contours produced by bilinguals; 4) Learning and attrition levels are different depending on sentence modality, such that learning is greater in modalities that differ less between BP and Spanish and attrition is greater in modalities that differ the most.

Ultrasonographic analysis of coronal fricative phonemes

Compare the tongue contour in different groups (children with typical, atypical phonological development and adults) in the production of fricative children, through ultrasound videos. The six participants were divided in three groups: Group DF - two children with phonological processes anteriorization of fricative (/ʃ/→ [s]), (both with seven years), group DT - two children with typical development of language (eight and nine years old) and group AD - two adults, all speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. The videos of the movement of the tongue in the production of target sounds inserted in the words /'sapo/, /'sika/, /'suko/, /'∫ave/, /'∫ike/ and /'∫uva/ were organized and evaluated by three judges speech therapists with experience in this area, guided in VAS. It has been observed that, for two of the judges, there was a significant difference between the words produced by children with DF and CT when compared with the words in contexts and vowel [i] and [u], and the productions of these children /∫/→[s] and /s/→[s], respectively, but not for words accompanied [a]. When comparing the data of children with DF and AD, there was statistically significant (p-value < 0.05) in the context of vowel [u]. The judges have detected articulatory differences between typical and atypical productions for children, as well as differentiation also as to the production of adults.

Prosodic boundary incongruences in oral reading

Background: Characteristics of oral readings are well studied in school-aged children and teenagers, but not in educated adults. Objectives: Assess the prevalence of prosodic boundary incongruences in oral readings of adult, native, educated, Brazilian Portuguese speakers and analyze their correlations with specific linguist features. Design, settings, and participants: We studied an online video corpus of political speeches delivered by house members of the Brazilian parliament between 2017 and 2018, and their respective written texts. Measurements: We assessed a) prosodic boundary incongruences between oral readings and written texts, b) actor prototypicality of the subjects, c) thematic continuity of the sentences, and d) a variable called 'sufficiency', related to the concept of argumenthood, assorting each word according to its need for complementary words. The inter-rater reliability of the author's perceptions of incongruences underwent Cohen's Kappa test. Results: In 5 hours of oral readings, we found a median of 1.4 prosodic boundary incongruences per minute (interquartile range: 0.766 - 2.212). 80% of the incongruences were insertions of non-terminal or terminal boundaries. Prosodic boundary incongruency correlated positively with a) thematic continuity of the incongruent sentences (p-value = 0.0006345), b) the concept of 'sufficiency' (p-value < 2.2e-16); and correlated negatively with c) first-person subjects (p-value = 0.0002584). Limitations: The assessment of the variables was subjective, and we did not control sentences for their lengths when analyzing variables 'b' and 'c'. Conclusions: Prosodic boundary incongruences were relatively common in our corpus. We introduced some hypotheses to explain the results.

On pre-stressed high vowels raising process in brazilian portuguese

This paper discusses the hypothesis that the outputs of derived pre-stressed high vowels [i] and [u], in Brazilian Portuguese, are acoustically different from the outputs of the non-derived high vowels, although both are perceptually equivalent. The sample totalizes 1152 tokens extracted from a controlled corpus, recorded at the Phonetic Laboratory of Rio de Janeiro Federal University (UFRJ), with eight university graduate students, four men and four women, from Rio de Janeiro, using acoustic measurements (PRAAT) and multivariational analysis (GOLDVARB X) in order to detect the conditioning factors related to the first and second formant values. The results reveal differences between underlying and derived vowels.

Prosody-syntax interface and prosodic phrasing in brazilian portuguese

This paper focuses on the Brazilian Portuguese (PB) prosodic phrasing and has two main goals: (1) to find a correlation between the prosodic constituents boundaries, as described by the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory (Nespor & Vogel, 2007 [1986], a.o.) and the perception and production of spontaneous and reading speech breaks, and (2) to describe the phonological characteristics and the syntactic ranking of perceived and non perceived edges. The corpus under analysis includes 5 extracts both of spontaneous and reading speech lasting about 2 minutes each. The reading speech (LE) emerged from the spontaneous speech (FE) orthographic transcription which was collected from an interview in an informal environment. In the perception test, 11 referees heard the 10 speaking extracts, without punctuation, and marked the perceived breaks in the orthographic transcription of each of them. Both the 5 speakers and the 11 referees were students at UFRJ, born in Rio de Janeiro, and were between 22 and 38 years old.The results point out that the prosodic breaks are mainly perceived at the intonational phrase (I) boundary, regardless of the speech style (FE: 91%; LE 99%). However, in LE, 64% of the foreseen I boundaries, described by the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory, were perceived as breaks, but in FE, just 37% were perceived. The most usual nuclear contour in both styles is H+L* L% (this being the Portuguese neutral declarative contour), but its occurrence frequency at perceived breaks draws a distinction between LE and FE (67% and 30%, respectively). In FE, contours like L+H* H% and L*+H H% are also produced (34%). In general, descendant nuclei in LE are predominant, as well as the edge tone L; in FE, both the descendant and ascendant nuclei distribution and low or high boundaries are similar. After running a statistic test, the appearance of an L edge, as a predictive for perception, was globally significant. Concerning the syntactic boundary, it was statistically checked and the result points out that breaks are mainly perceived at the matrix phrase limit (LE: 59%; FE: 61%,), showing the endurance of the matrix phrase edge/I boundary mapping. In general, FE has proved to have a bigger variation on the relation of predicted, perceived and produced, as it was expected, which was also confirmed by statistics. Therefore, the results show that the foreseen I phrasing is fairly robust in both styles, once only 13% of the predicted I boundaries have not been produced as so, regarding intonation. Besides, just 1,4% of the predicted phonological phrase (f) boundaries (and produced as Is) were perceived as breaks by the referees. With this study one may conclude that LE and FE share the same prosodic grammar, performed by the same type of phonological/syntactic cues; nevertheless, these are more consistent in LE and have a more disperse way in FE, adding to a greater difficulty at the systematic perception of prosodic boundaries in FE than in LE.

Prosody as a recursive embedding tool in production and perception of karajá

Hierarchical or indirect recursion can be found in different domains of human language and thus, it has been claimed to be the only part of language that is specific to humans (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002). However, in the past decade, both the claims that, recursion is the central component of the “narrow faculty of language” and that, it should be present in all languages have been the object of intense debate (cf. Pinker & Jackendoff, 2005; Everett, 2005). This debate triggered the exploration of new frontiers in the examination of embedded structures, which have been examined in acquisition and in processing and have been shown to be implemented through a wide array of linguistic resources in different languages. This paper presents an acoustic description and a neuro-psycholinguistic analysis (ERP/EEG) of an uncommon cognitive device to embed relative clauses. It is implemented in Karajá, a Macro-Je language spoken in Central Brazil, which uses pitch accent to signal relativization: (i) [tori do‟rode] „the white man arrived‟ versus (ii) [tori doro‟de] „the white man who arrived‟, first described in Ribeiro as stress shift (2006). The major interest in studying this phenomenon is because in Karajá, more than structuring envelopes for acts of speech, prosody codes directly onto the central syntactic algorithm of recursion. We found evidence in favor of a stronger facilitation to process a coordinated structure than a recursive structure. We found smaller RTs and amplitudes in the EEG related to the coordinated conditions versus the embedding conditions. Also, it seems that even though embedding is harder to launch, hierarchical structuring makes it easier to process in the third embedding, when comprehenders learn they are in an embedding mode. Coordination, on the other hand, being a default, is easier to launch, but it seems to become progressively harder as it does not benefit from hierarchical structuring.

command intonation in Brazilian Portuguese: a dialectal description from ALiB corpus

In this paper, we described the command intonational contours in the twenty-five Brazilian capitals included in the corpus “Linguistic Atlas of Brazil” (ALiB). This work aims at: (i) describing the intonational contour of twenty-five capitals from the corpus ALiB; (ii) comparing the intonation of the directive speech acts in the five Brazilian regions and (iii) proposing a phonological representation of the variation of this contour. Our corpus is composed of fifty imperative utterances produced by male and female speakers of the analyzed capitals. We observed that there is a predominance of a rising F0 movement in the prenucleus of the command contours with the phonological notation L*+H or L+H* in the twentyfive Brazilian capitals. In the nuclear position, the pitch accent can be defined for the majority of the capitals as H+L*L%, a falling F0 movement, with the variant H*L% for the capital Belém (PA). The capital that presented a different F0 movement in the nucleus was Florianópolis (SC) that showed the predominance of a rising-falling F0 movement represented as L+H*L%.

Illocution and attitude

This paper aims at investigating the prosodic relations between the category of illocution and that of attitude, the latter defined as the way the illocution (verbal action) is performed (Modis on Actum). We set three experiments and relative perception tests seeking to understand: (i) how different attitudes of the same illocution (Order) are perceived in different contexts; (ii) whether the illocutions of Order and Instruction are conveyed by the same prosodic form; (iii) how pragmatic/cognitive parameters work to accommodate a different prosodic form, using the illocutions of Offer and Question of Confirmation. We conclude that the methodology for the study of the illocutionary prosodic forms must pay close attention to the prosodic aspects of attitude, since they are always present when an illocution is performed, superposing their features over those of the illocution. We also claim that the identification of a specific illocution must consider some pragmatic and cognitive parameters, and not only prosody, since different illocutions can be prosodically performed with the same form. This becomes clear if we look for data in spontaneous speech corpora, where the pragmatic conditions can be at least partially reconstructed.

Editorial

It is a great joy for the entire team of the Journal of Speech Sciences (JoSS) to be able to offer the scientific community the first issue in honor of a researcher in our field. Let this number be dedicated to the eminent phoneticist Prof. João A. de Moraes has the moment of additional pleasure motivated not only by his brilliant career, but also by four important aspects that immediately emphasize those who live with Prof. Moraes: his erudition, his renowned scientific competence, his generosity and his kindness. It is very rare that, in the academic-scientific field, we find these qualities combined in a single person, but, in him, they are in harmony even with a well-marked Rio accent.