Aspectos prosódicos e entoacionais em produções de frases assertivas e interrogativas totais produzidas por surdos oralizados

Abstract

This research aims to describe and analyze the intonational patterns of the oral production in the reading of oralized deaf people in affirmative and total interrogative sentences of the Brazilian Portuguese language, as well as compare them to the patterns of the same kind of sentences produced by speakers-listeners. In order to have a control group, we compare the data to the descriptions for Brazilian Portuguese made by João Moraes (1993, 2006, 2007), Castelo e Frota (2016), Soares (2016), Miranda (2015), Cunha (2011, 2013) Silvestre (2012) and Silva (2011) so we could validate them. Our investigation was guided by the following question: Does the intonational pattern of the oral production of oralized deaf people correspond to the intonational pattern of a speaker-listener in a way that regular listeners would understand? This question brought these hypotesis: 1) the lenght of the sintatic constituint can influence the prosodical configuration in the production of oralized deaf people; 2) the variation of F0 in the production of oralized deaf people won’t be similar to the variation of speakers-listeners; 3) the intonational pattern of the production in total affirmative and total interrogative sentences of oralized deaf people will not correspond to the intonational pattern of speakers-listeners that are validated by the descriptions made for Brazilian Portuguese and 4) the speakers-listeners that will analyze the sentences produced by deaf people, won’t be able to identify if they are affirmative or interrogative. Our data collection was divided in two steps. At first, we gathered reading data of oralized deaf people and speakers-listeners. We described: a) the distribution of intonational syntagmas in the sentences produced by oralized deaf people and compared them to the ones of speakers-listeners (as they were organized in oral production), b) the curve of fundamental frequency (F0) and c) the intonational pattern of both productions (oralized deaf people and speakers-listeners). We compared the characterization of the data of speakers- listeners to the description in the literature of the field to validate these data as control for our research. The second step was to create a perception test with a second group of speakers- listeners of the Brazilian Portuguese language in order to verify if this group would be able to recognize these two modalities (affirmative and total interrogative sentences) as such, given that this distinction is necessary to establish understanding in communication. Our theoric foundation was based on Intonational Phonology (PIERREHUMBERT 1980; LADD 1996, 2008) and Prosodic Phonology (JUNG, 2005; NESPOR e VOGEL 2007). Our researchs was in accordance in the results that the investigations we mentioned above, with focus on Brazilian Portuguese, achieved.