A pausa e a sua relação com o estado emocional das mulheres com câncer de mama

Abstract

Breast cancer (BC) is certainly one of the most feared diseases in women, probably due to its high incidence and, especially, due to the emotional impact caused by its diagnosis and treatment. Women who get BC go through several stages, including diagnosis, drug therapy, chemotherapy and radiotherapy and "mutilation", which may explain the occurrence of certain prosodic features such as pause, possibly related to emotional changes. This study aims to describe the pause prosodic parameter that characterizes the speech of patients with breast cancer in three stages: (pre-surgical) diagnosis, treatment (after mastectomy) and healing of disease, or rather: F1, F2 and F3, respectively. For the study, nine women with breast cancer, aged from 35 to 60, were individually invited to an open interview with questions about their personal history and pathology. The interviews took place in an indoor environment and were recorded on a digital recorder and fully transcribed. The analysis and interpretation of data was conducted through the Praat program, a software for acoustic analysis, which was followed by a comparative study of the variables observed in the early stages of the disease. According to the results, we found out that there is a pause profile characteristic for each stage of the disease, motivated by emotional changes due to damage caused by the disease itself and its treatment.