Effects of F0 movements, intensity, and duration in the perceptual identification of Brazilian Portuguese wh-questions and wh-exclamations

ABSTRACT This study presents a perceptual analysis of the Brazilian Portuguese wh-question and wh-exclamation intonational contours to discriminate their acoustic and perceptual features. The corpus of this study is composed of the sentence “Como você sabe” (“How do you know” vs. “How clever you are!”), which was produced with both speech acts. Two perceptual identification experiments were designed to assess the subjects’ ability to identify these speech acts based on their prosodic characteristics, as well as the perceptual relevance of specific prosodic cues in the recognition of wh-questions and wh-exclamations. The results of the first perceptual test indicated that Brazilian listeners can identify these two speech acts by intonation only, whereas the second test showed that F0, duration and intensity cues contribute to the perceptual identification of the speech acts. Stimuli with a falling F0 movement in the last stressed syllable tend to be interpreted as wh-questions, whereas stimuli with a slightly rising F0 movement tend to be judged as wh-exclamations.