O papel da prosódia no processamento do discurso em língua portuguesa: um estudo de percepção em laboratório on-line

Abstract

The segmentation of boundaries is an important component for good performance in understanding narratives, as well as in everyday activities, since they indicate satisfactory information processing, reaffirmed by the correlation between the structure of the external situation and the structure of the mental representation. Prosody, in turn, plays an enlightening role in this study, since it has the function of structuring the flow of information in discourse. In this sense, the structuring prosodic mechanisms that act in the processing of events can be revealed through behavioral tests. This study aims to identify and characterize prosodic linguistic marks arranged in event boundaries in Portuguese, based on behavioral experiments. To this end, we developed a segmentation experiment with the purpose of testing the agreement of segmentation among untrained examiners, based on an event-based model. In this experiment, we presented participants with spontaneous oral narratives and asked them to press a key every time they thought there was a boundary between discourse units. Twenty-seven people participated in the experiment. Based on the results, we found that the boundaries perceived as being prominent have specific prosodic characteristics. In short, these characteristics are a greater difference in tone, a greater difference in intensity and duration between the stressed syllables adjacent to them. The results indicate a need to verify the effects of prosodic perception on event processing, using online linguistic processing techniques, such as pupillometry and electroencephalography, for example.