Audiovisual Perception of WH-Questions and WH-Exclamations in Brazilian Portuguese

International audienceThis paper examines auditory and visual cues used for the discrimination of wh-question and whexclamative speech acts in Brazilian Portuguese. The sentence Como você sabe was uttered as a whquestion (meaning How do you know?) and as a whexclamation (meaning How clever you are!) by ten Brazilian Portuguese speakers (five males and five females) from Rio de Janeiro. The acoustic and visual analyses revealed that these two speech acts not only showed different F0 contours and intensity patterns, but also discriminant facial expressions. A perceptual experiment that investigates the role of visual versus audio channels with three presentation conditions (audio only, video only and audiovisual) was applied with sixty Brazilian participants (twenty per condition). The results indicate that listeners rely on both channels to perceive the wh-questions and whexclamations and that the audiovisual condition was more accurately recognized than the monomodal ones