Event segmentation in Libras
Segmentation of narrated events. Perception of narrated events. Prosody. Sign language.
The ability to segment continuous activity into parts is an important component of understanding narratives. Studies show that during the perception of an activity, whether it is performed or narrated, changes in the characteristics displayed in the information source act as clues for segmentation in significant events. In this study, we observed how the changes of situational (time, space, character, object, objective and causality) and physical (linguistic marks) act in the segmentation process of narratives signaled in Libras. For this, we developed a segmentation experiment with the purpose of testing the segmentation agreement between untrained examiners, based on an event-based model. In this experiment, we subject hearing and deaf people to Libras narratives spontaneously recorded, without interference from Portuguese. The narratives were translated and segmented into units of prayer and each sentence was classified according to the change (s) listed here. Participants had to press a key each time they felt there was a boundary between the most comprehensive units of meaning. The answers were collected through the Gorilla platform and translated into ELAN, when they could be compared. The results showed excerpts of greater agreement between the participants. For the analysis, we verified the association between the changes defined as variable and the sentences whose judgments showed greater agreement. A logistic regression was performed and the model with situational change showed the best result [X² (1) = 14.085; p <0.001; R²Negelkerke = 0.143; OR = 9.414; 95% CI = 2.121 - 41.776], indicating the influence of this variable in the judgments. The pause did not show a significant result. Subsequently, the sections of greatest agreement were described according to six groupings of prosodic marks or the absence of these marks, namely: repetition, pause, shoulder, head, facial expression and trunk. Of these, we highlight the pause, repetition and trunk marks, as they present higher values in the distribution of the stretches. The pause and repetition had the highest values in the position before the most marked prayers as a frontier, probably due to the effect of sudden change of movement that they provoke in the perception; and the trunk showed higher values in the position of these sentences, probably due to the role that the trunk plays in the character change, which is consistent with one of the types of situational change responsible for more border judgments. We concluded by pointing out difficulties in classifying and systematizing prosodic marks in sign languages, which may have had an impact on the results presented here.