An Acoustic Study of Telephone Speaking Style in Brazilian Portuguese

Resumo

This paper presents an acoustic analysis of the telephone speaking style in a Brazilian Portuguese corpus. The corpus contains 80 recordings from 20 speakers (10 male and 10 female) in two non-simultaneous conditions: face-to-face (non-mediated speaking style) and via mobile phone (telephone speaking style) and were recorded in silent and noisy environments. The acoustic analysis is divided considering global and local parameters, which are tested with respect to their correlation with condition (face-to-face, mobile phone), environment (silent, noisy) and speakers’ gender (male, female). For global parameters, spectral emphasis and F₀-peak production rate in noisy environment tend to be higher in comparison with their values in silent environment. For local parameters, the use of mobile phone in noisy environments causes an increase of the F₀-median. The F₀ standard-deviation is higher in this condition when compared to face-to-face condition. Concerning the differences between genders, F₀-median of male speakers tends to be higher in mobile condition when in noisy environments. Even though females’ values for F₀ standard-deviation are higher in each recording condition than males’, males’ values for this parameter differ more across face-to-face vs. mobile phone conditions if compared to women’s.