Social affective variations in Brazilian Portuguese: a perceptual and acoustic analysis.

This work presents a description and an analysis of an attitudinal corpus recorded in Brazilian Portuguese by 21 speakers. The interpretation of their performances across 17 situations, by L1 speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, is studied thanks to a free-labelling experiment. The grouping of expressions is then related to acoustic parameters of prosody. The interpretation of these descriptions is done in the light of literature on expression of affect in voice, and theories of symbolic use of voice in spoken interactions (Ohala's Frequency Code, and Gussenhoven's Effort Code). Results show that the main dimensions of meaning retrieved by the listeners may be summarized as: positive valence, assertive and dubitative expressions. These dimensions do correlate with the acoustical measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]