Abstract
Background: Characteristics of oral readings are well studied in school-aged children and teenagers, but not in educated adults. Objectives: Assess the prevalence of prosodic boundary incongruences in oral readings of adult, native, educated, Brazilian Portuguese speakers and analyze their correlations with specific linguist features. Design, settings, and participants: We studied an online video corpus of political speeches delivered by house members of the Brazilian parliament between 2017 and 2018, and their respective written texts. Measurements: We assessed a) prosodic boundary incongruences between oral readings and written texts, b) actor prototypicality of the subjects, c) thematic continuity of the sentences, and d) a variable called 'sufficiency', related to the concept of argumenthood, assorting each word according to its need for complementary words. The inter-rater reliability of the author's perceptions of incongruences underwent Cohen's Kappa test. Results: In 5 hours of oral readings, we found a median of 1.4 prosodic boundary incongruences per minute (interquartile range: 0.766 - 2.212). 80% of the incongruences were insertions of non-terminal or terminal boundaries. Prosodic boundary incongruency correlated positively with a) thematic continuity of the incongruent sentences (p-value = 0.0006345), b) the concept of 'sufficiency' (p-value < 2.2e-16); and correlated negatively with c) first-person subjects (p-value = 0.0002584). Limitations: The assessment of the variables was subjective, and we did not control sentences for their lengths when analyzing variables 'b' and 'c'. Conclusions: Prosodic boundary incongruences were relatively common in our corpus. We introduced some hypotheses to explain the results.
Highlights
An old, recurrent metaphor represents writings as carcasses of speech and linguistic studies of written corpora as autopsies on oral language corpses [1]
2.1 Corpus and participants The corpus consisted of a public online database of video recordings of speeches given on the Brazilian Senate floor from 2017 to 2018 by native Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers [18]
The criteria for the selection were a) the speaker had read aloud any sentence of his speech, and b) the original written text upon which the oral reading was based was available to the authors
Summary
Recurrent metaphor represents writings as carcasses of speech and linguistic studies of written corpora as autopsies on oral language corpses [1]. As stated in Barbosa and Raso [2], is "absent from writing in its acoustic manifestation, except for mere indications inferred from punctuation marks" In such manner, how can readers bring written texts back to life without making them look like dysprosodic zombies? Objectives: Assess the prevalence of prosodic boundary incongruences in oral readings of adult, native, educated, Brazilian Portuguese speakers and analyze their correlations with specific linguist features. Measurements: We assessed a) prosodic boundary incongruences between oral readings and written texts, b) actor prototypicality of the subjects, c) thematic continuity of the sentences, and d) a variable called “sufficiency”, related to the concept of argumenthood, assorting each word according to its need for complementary words.
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