O falar paranaense

This book didactically addresses relevant issues for researchers in the linguistic field as well as professors, journalists and whoever else is interested in understating the so called “paranaense dialect”. It is relevant to clarify, however, that there is not one single dialect from Parana as the state has three distinctive dialectal areas. That means the traditional speech from the state corresponds to its historical settlement. The first area dates back to the XVIII century in the center-south-coast direction; the second area dates from the 1920´s and 1930´s matching the arrival of immigrants from Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina in the search for new territories, clearing forestry regions from the Southwest and Western regions in Parana, turning them into harvesting areas. The third linguistic area corresponds to the North and Northwest of Parana, which were colonized in the 1940´s and 1950´s by immigrants from Minas Gerais and São Paulo who came to grow coffee plants in its rich red land. Such dialectal diversity constitutes only a small fraction of what is understood as the Brazilian Portuguese. So, having it described means to collaborate to map the great linguistic mosaic that characterizes the whole Brazilian territory. We then seek to offer readers a small sample of the analyses carried out by researchers concerning the different performances of the Portuguese spoken in Parana (Banco VARSUL, ALERS, Atlas Linguístico do Paraná, Banco VARLINFE). We expect these findings encourage new approaches and Linguistic studies from other regions of the state.

Método para reconhecimento de vogais e extração de parâmetros acústicos para analises forenses

Forensic speaker comparison exams have complex characteristics, demanding a long time for manual analysis. A method for automatic recognition of vowels, providing feature extraction for acoustic analysis is proposed, aiming to contribute as a support tool in these exams. The proposal is based in formant measurements by LPC (Linear Predictive Coding), selectively by fundamental frequency detection, zero crossing rate, bandwidth and continuity, with the clustering being done by the k-means method. Experiments using samples from three different databases have shown promising results, in which the regions corresponding to five of the Brasilian Portuguese vowels were successfully located, providing visualization of a speaker’s vocal tract behavior, as well as the detection of segments corresponding to target vowels.