At 200 meters turn right: the intonation of the GPS commands
GPS. intonation. Directive Speech
The GPS (Global Positioning System) or Global Positioning System is a mechanism that allows finding geographic positions and uses a voice produced by speech synthesis to provide guidance commands and instruct listeners. Because it is an instruction, the speech of the GPS fits the Theory of Speech Acts, more specifically in the directive acts, which aim to make the listener perform the action given by the speaker. Some studies point to the important role of prosody in directive speech. Intonation, for example, has the function of differentiating directive speech acts in communication (SANTOS, 2010; GOMES DA SILVA, CARNAVAL & MORAES, 2020), since different elements of the physical correlates demonstrate different attitudes of the speaker ( QUEIROZ, 2011). In general, systems that use speech synthesis have no problems with respect to the segmental level. However, studies have shown that they are still flawed at the prosodic level (TAYLOR, 2009). The present study proposes to analyze and describe the intonation patterns of directive speech produced by GPS systems and compare them with the human voice. To achieve this objective, the corpus of analysis will use 20 sentences from Google Maps, 20 sentences from Waze and the realization of these sentences by a native female participant of Brazilian Portuguese. Acoustic analysis and description of intonation patterns will be performed using a procedure performed by Almeida (2017), with the scripts AnalyseTier (HIRST, 2012), Momel/Intsint (HIRST, 2007) and ProsodyPro (XU, 2013), together with the PRAAT and a statistical test will be applied using the R software.