Acoustic correlates of stress: A cross-linguistic analysis of Brazilian Portuguese and Castilian Spanish
Dr. Letania Ferreira, Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco (UFRPE), Cabo de Santo Agostinho
Friday April 28, 2017
Noon – 1PM
Spanish and Portuguese Library – 5125 Dwinelle Hall
Talk in English
Studies addressing the acoustic correlates of stress in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Castilian Spanish (CS) [Major (1992), Massini (1991) Barbosa (1996) and (2002), Ortega (2006), Ortega-Llebaria & Prieto (2007, 2010), among others], have analyzed the importance of duration, pitch and intensity to the expression of stress in these languages. These studies suggest that despite the similarities between these languages, their speakers use different strategies to convey stress.
This presentation focuses on a cross-linguistic study that compares semi-identical corpora in these languages. The results show an interesting interplay where the smaller reliability of a certain stress cue (duration or pitch) is compensated by a greater use of the other cue.
Letania Ferreira is a professor at the Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco (UFRPE), Cabo de Santo Agostinho (Brazil). She was a double major in Portuguese and English at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE), Recife. She earned a Masters degree in Romance Language at The University of Georgia, Athens, and a PhD in Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has professional experience in the USA, Belgium, and Brazil. Her main research areas are: Comparative studies in Romance Languages, Acoustic Analyses and Language Variation.