Acoustic and Articulatory Correlates of Prosodic Prominence

Maria Cantoni, Pablo Arantes, Maurlio Vieira, Joo Pedro H. Sanso, Jos Eduardo C. Silva

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

mcantoni@ufmg.br

Gestural accounts of speech have gained increasing attention in the past decades. These models
assume that the building blocks of speech are gestures, articulatory routines resulting from the
movement of articulators in coordination in both space and time. Gestural patterns gain the
status of representational entities, implemented through phonetic encoding mechanisms.
Gesture-based approaches have been specially focused on modeling segment and syllable-level
phenomena, but recent contributions were incorporated on the modeling of higher-level
prosodic structure and related processes [1] [2] [3] [4].
This paper aims at evaluating articulatory and acoustic properties of Brazilian Portuguese (BP)
prosodic prominence patterns, adopting concepts from gesture-based models [5] [6]. Emphasis
will be given to phonation and glottal articulatory dynamics as contributing to implementation
of lexical stress. The entrainment between stress and intonational structure will also be
considered. Although it has been established that syllabic duration is one of the major acoustic
correlates of lexical and phrasal stress [7] in BP, further investigation about the influence of
word and sentence stress on other acoustic and articulatory parameters is needed since most
analyses of BP stress and intonation are based on intuitive data alone. In this sense, this paper
presents relevant contributions to the understanding of BP prosodic patterns, and also
incorporates results to a general understanding of how syllables, as internally structured in a
gestural coupling dynamics, interact with other syllables and with higher level prosodic
structure.
An experiment was designed to investigate how the glottal activity is affected by stress and
accent in BP and how glottal parameters interact with acoustical ones. Five BP native speakers
were tested using a two-channel electroglottograph (EGG) and a head-worn microphone while
pronouncing carrier sentences where target words were in broad or narrow/contrastive focus
position. Target words were three-syllable words with ultimate, penultimate and
antepenultimate stress, strictly controlled for the precedent and following environments.
Simultaneously recorded acoustic and EGG signals were measured for the speakers tested,
contrasting stressed and unstressed syllables as well as stressed syllables assigned with narrow
and broad focus. EGG signal is related to the area and longitudinal length of the vocal fold
contact [8] [9], and can therefore indicate larynx-level articulatory characteristics potentially
affected by prosodic prominence. The EGG measures analyzed were CQ (contact quotient), SI
(speed index), as in [10], and slopes of glottal opening and closing.
Articulatory variables tested in the experiment were compared to acoustic variables traditionally
viewed as stress correlates: duration, overall intensity, spectral emphasis [11], F1 and
intonation (F0 contour). Preliminary results show that word stress and sentence accent in BP
can be related to glottal articulatory configurations as attested for other languages by previous
works (e.g. [12] [13] [14]), presenting a valuable contribution to gesture-based modeling of
prosodic prominence.

However, due to the complex interactions between acoustic and articulatory parameters,
complementary analyses are necessary before clear generalizations can be made. We believe that
further research using advanced techniques capable of measuring activities of other articulators
involved in intonation and stress, like respiratory system, vocal tract and facial articulators,
could contribute substantially to a better understanding of how sound patterns emerge from the
organizing activation of abstract gestures and their implementation through the physical
individual articulators.
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