Prosody and perception of sadness in reports of women victims of domestic violence

Abstract

Understanding the role of prosody in the construction of expressive meaning in interactions is important, as all languages have different intonations that are appropriate for different situations and contexts, such as the expression of emotions. The perception that speakers have of certain utterances due to prosodic particularities can help investigate how prosody contributes to the construction of meaning. This study is part of a broader investigation that examined the prosodic characteristics of sadness in reports of domestic violence suffered by women (Ribeiro, 2024). The aim of the study was to analyze the perception of sadness in excerpts taken from these reports. To this end, segments classified as sad and neutral excerpts (based on the researchers’ perception and prosodic characteristics) were extracted from three videos containing reports of women victims of domestic violence found on the video-sharing platform YouTube. Subsequently, these excerpts were subjected to perception tests aimed at either identifying emotions (forced choice format) or assigning emotional labels (free answer format) in order to verify how native speakers perceived the presence or absence of emotions in these utterances. Findings indicate that participants were able to determine when the excerpts heard were neutral or denoted sadness even in short excerpts and outside their enunciative context. This suggest that prosody may play a relevant role in this interpretation.