Article published in:
Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance: Approaches across linguistic subfields
Edited by Meghan E. Armstrong, Nicholas Henriksen and Maria del Mar Vanrell
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 6] 2016
► pp. 135–152

Prosody and Emotion in Brazilian Portuguese

| Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – CNPq
| LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France

This study addresses the production and perception of four emotions (anger, joy, sadness, and fear) performed in Brazilian Portuguese sentences of different modes: declarative (assertions), interrogative (yes/no questions), and imperative (orders). The results of an acoustic analysis and of perception tests are presented. Fundamental frequency and duration are both modified by the expression of emotions and sentence modes. Expressions of emotions mostly affect the mean register, while sentence modes mostly affect the shape of the intonation contour. The relative perceptual importance of audio and visual cues in the recognition of emotions and modes is discussed: audio cues carry less information than visual ones to recognize emotions, but more to recognize modes.

Keywords: acoustic and perceptual correlates, audiovisual prosody, emotions, face-to-face communication, sentence mode
Published online: 31 March 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.6.07mor
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