Descrição prosódica e entoacional de expressões de mentira

Abstract

This study sought to identify and analyze prosodic and intonational patterns in false statements, based on Prosodic Phonology (Nespor & Vogel, 2007) and Intonational Phonology (Pierrehumbert, 1980; Ladd 1996, 2008). The research was based on the idea that there are differences in speech patterns when the speaker tells a lie, compared to the production of truthful statements. From this perspective, with the intention of verifying this idea and contributing to studies in the field of intonational and prosodic phonology, audio recordings of ten participants, undergraduate students at a Brazilian federal university, were analyzed. The corpus consisted of 60 (sixty) sentences, as each participant read six sentences, three of which were true and three of which were false. We formulated the following hypotheses: 1) there will be a greater occurrence of pauses in false sentences; 2) the rate of speech will be higher in false statements; 3) the elocution time will be longer in the false sentences; 4) the articulation time will be reduced in the false sentences; 5) the articulation rate will be lower in the false sentences; 6) stressed vowels will be more elongated in the false sentences; 7) tessitura values (difference between maximum F0 and minimum F0) will be higher in the false statements; 8) there will be a higher occurrence of H% (high tones) in false sentences. Data collection was carried out following these steps: i) data recording (which took place in an acoustic booth, allowing data collection to occur with as little noise interference as possible); ii) data segmentation and coding in the Praat program; iii) acoustic analysis of the data in the Praat program. Regarding the results, from a prosodic point of view, we observed that: a) speech rate cannot be considered an exclusive characteristic of lying; b) the proximity of the speech rate values obtained between the two types of sentences (true and false) suggests that this variable is not a good reference for differentiating lies from truth; c) the differences observed in the duration of stressed vowels between true and false sentences were not statistically significant; d) regarding tessitura, the study identified that, although there was a tendency for higher values in false sentences, this difference was not statistically significant. From the perspective of intonational phonology, L% boundary tones (low tones) prevailed in both lying and truthful statements, rather than high tones (H%), as expected, which would predominate in lying sentences.