The prosody of the TV news speaking style in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This study characterizes the prosodic structure of the TV news speaking style in Brazil and compares it to the speech of interview subjects on a television talk show. Fifteen distinct metrics, designed to characterize both temporal and melodic characteristics of speech, were evaluated on the two speaking styles. The results of the analysis show that the TV news speaking style is characterized by a lack of filled pauses, a fast speaking rate, few and short silent pauses, and a high percentage of dynamic tones. However, the only metric for which the difference in speaking styles was shown to be statistically significant was the intra-vocalic mean melodic movement.