Mudan as na Estrutura o Prosódica de Texto Jornalístico antes e após Interven o Fonoaudiológica

Prosody has a crucial role in TV news speaking style in transmitting the message to listener.Speaking style influences prosodic structure and may characterize a distinctive mark of aperson or a social group speech. Besides, speaking style allows the speaker to attract thelistener′s attention to particular chunks of his/her announcement. The aim of this work is tostudy the rhythmic organization of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) TV news speaking style byanalyzing the evolution of the normalized duration of vowel-to-vowel units (VV units)throughout the utterances in two conditions (before and after vocal training workshops). Forthis study two students of journalism were submitted to vocal training workshops for six months.Each meeting lasted one hour and thirty minutes. The training workshops intended to improvephonoarticulatory aspects involved in TV news speaking style. The students read a specific textbefore and after the training but did not receive direct instructions as how to read the text. ThePraat Software was used to analyze the VV durations and statistic analyses were carried out.Statistical analyses of VV durations did not show differences between before and afterintervention as a whole, but showed differences in specific stretches of the utterances,particularly in phrase stress position. These differences across conditions were considered anindication of the strategies developed by the participants during the training, such as theincrease of silent pause duration and the increase of VV duration in general. The increase in VVunits duration after the training may be considered a way of speaking the news with moreemphasis. These strategies did not appear before training. Based on the results of VV timingafter training it is possible to say that the training had a crucial role in improving theprofessional-related subjects′ speaking style. Perceptual tests were carried out to exam how thestrategies used by the subjects to read the announcement would be interpreted by the listenercomparing before and after intervention. The perceptual tests suggested that listeners doperceive emphasis in after-training reading and this seems to be related not only to longer VVunits, but also to expanded fundamental frequency range. The order that the announcementswere presented had influenced the listeners′ answers.