The role of duration and intensity factors in the characterization of modal intonation in Brazilian Portuguese spoken in the North of Brazil. Exploration of AMPER-POR data.

Resumen

The major aim of the current paper is to present an individual analysis of two physical parameters – duration (ms) and intensity (dB) – on four survey areas of Brazilian Portuguese spoken in the north of Brazil: Belém, Baião, Mocajuba and Curralinho. The selected data for this analysis stem originally from AMPER-POR database normalized by z-score.  Formerly, statistics analysis has shown that duration and intensity play a secondary role in the modal intonation characterization. These results comply with the main analysis performed on intensity in prosody studies of Portuguese by the AMPER project where it emerges not as strong parameter in modal intonation discrimination. Contrastingly, ‘duration’ has shown up as a vigorous physical parameter for the characterization of modal intonation.