The role of prosody in speech processing in Portuguese: a study with online experimental techniques
prosody. Spontaneous Narratives. Event Segmentation
Boundary segmentation is an important component for the good performance of understanding narratives as well as everyday activities as well, as they indicate satisfactory information processing, reaffirmed by the correlation between the structure of the external situation and the structure of the mental representation. Prosody, in turn, has an elucidating role in this study, as it has the function of structuring the flow of information in the discourse. In this direction, the prosodic structuring mechanisms that act in the processing of events can be revealed from neural responses collected through non-invasive and safe online experimental techniques and associated (offline) behavioral tests. This project aims to identify and characterize prosodic linguistic marks arranged at event boundaries in Portuguese, from online and offline experiments. For this, we developed a segmentation pilot experiment with the purpose of testing segmentation agreement between untrained examiners, using an event-based model. In this experiment, we subjected the participants to spontaneous oral narratives and asked them to press a key every time they thought there was a boundary between the discursive units. About 30 subjects participated in the experiment. Statistical analyzes made use of mixed linear model tests and binomial logistic regression. We found that the boundaries perceived by listeners as being prominent have specific prosodic characteristics. These characteristics are, in short, a greater difference in tone, a greater difference in intensity and duration between the stressed syllables that are adjacent to them. The results point to a need to verify the effects of prosodic perception on event processing, using online linguistic processing techniques, such as pupillometry and electroencephalography.