Características acústicas das oclusivas em falantes do português brasileiro com e sem uso profissional da voz

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: The relationship between voice perception and production plays a fundamental role in linguistic content, articulatory accuracy and sound quality. The involvement of several factors in communication attracts investigations in the physiological, perceptual, anatomical and acoustic fields. OBJECTIVE: to determine whether there are differences in the acoustic characteristics of stops produced by professional voice users (PV) and speakers without professional voice use (NPV), as well as whether there are differences in the acoustic characteristics of stops between males and females, with all participants being native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and living in the city of João Pessoa, Paraíba. The individuals who participated in this research were divided into different groups for the first experiment: PV and NPV, the latter being administrative employees of UFPB. For the second experiment, we divided the participants between males and females. METHODS: this is a documentary and retrospective research, the database used was from the Integrated Laboratory of Voice Studies - LIEV (UFPB). In total, 47 participants participated in this research, 25 PV and 22 NPV. The data used in this research were recordings of sentences spoken by radio announcers and non-announcers. We sought to analyze the VOT voice onset time of the occlusive consonants by comparing acoustic measures of the duration of the occlusive segments /p, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/ and /g/ in order to determine whether there are differences between PV and NPV, as well as differences between the male and female gender. RESULTS: A significant difference was found between PV and NPV in relation to the VOT duration of the consonants [d] (p=0.001) and [b] (p=0.001) in the pretonic position, [b] (p=0.031) and [g] (p=0.014) in the tonic position and [d] (p=0.005) in the post-tonic position. PV have a longer VOT duration for the production of these consonants compared to NPV. There was also a significant difference related to the VOT duration of the occlusive consonant [k] (p=0.038) in the stressed position. In this context, NPV have a longer VOT duration compared to PV regarding the production of this consonant. We found a significant difference between males and females regarding the VOT duration of the consonants [t] (p=0.077) in the pretonic position, [t] (p=0.011) and [k] (p=0.011) in the post-tonic position, [d] (p=0.004), [p] (p=0.020) and [b] (p=0.030) in the stressed positions. Males have a longer VOT duration for the production of these consonants compared to females. CONCLUSION: There are differences in the production of occlusive segments in Brazilian Portuguese between PV and NPV. Most of the occlusive segments that demonstrated significance had a longer VOT duration in the PV group. Only one segment [k] had a longer VOT duration in the NPV group. Given these results, we believe that clear speech may be able to influence speech production in contexts of professional voice use. There was a greater number of occlusive segments in pretonic and tonic positions in relation to the number of postonic ones. We believe that the aspect of the fundamental frequency (f0), as well as the vocal technique of speakers, may influence the production of pretonic consonants, and there may also be a slight increase in relation to pretonic consonants. Males have a longer VOT duration in the production of these consonants compared to females. We believe that this is due to the anatomical reason of the genders, since males have more rigid vocal folds.