The identification of Brazilian Portuguese regional varieties through intonational information

Abstract This study aims to verify if Brazilian Portuguese speakers are able to recognize their own regional varieties only by listening to the intonational information. It also aims to search for cues in F0 variation, which can justify the performance of the participants. The two experiments conducted in this study deal with three varieties of Brazilian Portuguese: the variety of Pelotas (RS), São Paulo (Mooca district) and Senador Pompeu (CE). Experiment 1 was developed with delexicalised speech stimuli, e.g., intonational information only; experiment 2 presented stimuli with a flat melodic curve only, e.g., with no F0 variations. The results based on the Detection Theory (MACMILLAN; CREELMAN, 2005) showed that the participants had a performance above chance. The results obtained in both experiments were different as we observed more recognition difficulties in the experiment with delexicalized stimuli. The tendency of false alarms also showed that intonational information plays an important role in the recognition of regional varieties.