Brazilian Portuguese Speakers Research Articles

Correlations between vocabulary and phonological acquisition: number of words produced versus acquired consonants.

To verify the probable correlations between the number of word types and the number of consonants in the general phonological system in children with typical language development. Study participants were 186 children aged one year and six months to five years, 11 months and 29 days who were monolingual Brazilian Portuguese speakers with typical language development. Data collection involved speech, language and hearing assessments and spontaneous speech recordings. Phonology was assessed with regard to the number of acquired consonants in the general phonological system, in each syllable structure and in Implicational Model of Feature Complexity (IMFC) levels. Vocabulary was assessed with regard to number of word types produced. These data were compared across age groups. After that, correlations between the word types produced and the variables established for the phonological system were analyzed. The significance level adopted was 5%. All phonological aspects evaluated presented gradual growth. Word types produced showed a similar behavior, though with a small regression at the age of five years. Different positive correlations occurred between the spoken word types and the variables analyzed in the phonological system. Only one negative correlation occurred with respect to the production of complex onset in the last age group analyzed. The phonology and vocabulary of the study participants present similar behaviors. There are many positive correlations between the word types produced and the different aspects of phonology, except regarding complex onset.

Perception of height and categorization of Brazilian Portuguese front vowels

ABSTRACT Cross-linguistic typological observations and theoretical models in phonology suggest that certain speech sound distinctions are more complex then others. One such example is the opposition between mid-high and mid-low vowels, usually thought to be more complex than the opposition between high and mid vowels. The present study provides experimental evidence on speech sound perception which supports this notion. Native Brazilian Portuguese speakers performed vowel classification tasks involving either the distinction between the front high mid /e/ and the front high /i/, or the distinction between the front high mid /e/ and the front low mid /ε/ vowel. Measures of response time and discriminability (d') at the vowel category boundaries were obtained. Participants showed significantly slower responses and lower d' values in the "e-ε" as compared to the "i-e" classification task. Results indicate that perceptually distinguishing /e/ from /ı/ requires more processing time and resources, and involves more complex information than distinguishing /e/ from /i/.

Modality annotation for Portuguese: from manual annotation to automatic labeling

We investigate modality in Portuguese and we combine a linguistic perspective with an application-oriented perspective on modality. We design an annotation scheme reflecting theoretical linguistic concepts and apply this schema to a small corpus sample to show how the scheme deals with real world language usage. We present two schemas for Portuguese, one for spoken Brazilian Portuguese and one for written European Portuguese. Furthermore, we use the annotated data not only to study the linguistic phenomena of modality, but also to train a practical text mining tool to detect modality in text automatically. The modality tagger uses a machine learning classifier trained on automatically extracted features from a syntactic parser. As we only have a small annotated sample available, the tagger was evaluated on 11 modal verbs that are frequent in our corpus and that denote more than one modal meaning. Finally, we discuss several valuable insights into the complexity of the semantic concept of modality that derive from the process of manual annotation of the corpus and from the analysis of the results of the automatic labeling: ambiguity and the semantic and syntactic properties typically associated to one modal meaning in context, and also the interaction of modality with negation and focus. The knowledge gained from the manual annotation task leads us to propose a new unified scheme for modality that applies to the two Portuguese varieties and covers both written and spoken data.

Nasalance values for syllables produced by Brazilian Portuguese speakers.

This study aimed to determine nasalance values for syllables produced by Brazilian Portuguese speakers of different ages and gender. Nasalance scores were collected for 14 syllables (10 orals and 4 nasals) using Nasometer II 6400. The participants were 245 Brazilian Portuguese speakers (121 males and 124 females), both genders, divided into four age groups: 57 children, 61 adolescents, 65 young adults and 62 adults. Nasalance scores for nasal syllables were higher than for oral syllables. For both, oral and nasal syllables, nasalance scores were higher for vowel /i/ than for /a/. Across all syllables, the females' nasalance scores were higher than males, with most of this difference attributed to the oldest age group where females mean nasalance was three points higher than males. Values obtained demonstrated nasalance scores variation according to gender, particularly for the adult group and for the syllables tested.

Gender features in pronoun resolution processing in Brazilian Portuguese

Given the fact that the parser has a very restrictive focus of attention, it is memory retrieval that helps us to bind antecedents and pronouns in coreference, which is considered a long distance dependency. Our memory seems to work in a content-addressable way (McElree, 2000; McElree et al, 2003; van Dyke and McElree, 2006), that is, all the antecedent candidates that match the pronoun cues are simultaneously accessed and the correct antecedent is retrieved. However, memory can suffer interference from distractors (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Lewis, Vasishth & van Dyke, 2006), items that are similar to the antecedent. Consequently the strength of association between the pronoun’s cues and the antecedent’s features reduces, and distractors can be retrieved instead of the antecedent. According to some psycholinguistic studies, at least two kinds of cues might play a role in this process: the structural constraints related to Principle B and agreement between antecedents and pronouns. This research aims to investigate how nominal antecedents are retrieved in Brazilian Portuguese, which is a language with morphology richness. The question is whether the structural constraints cues and the agreement cues would have the same influence in coreference processing. Moreover, a comparison between different types of agreement features will also be examined in order to find out whether memory retrieves feminine features differently from masculine; and whether grammatical gender, which is an invariable and arbitrary gender, is retrieved differently from semantic gender, which is related to the biological gender of the referent. The results of an eye-tracking study conducted with 24 native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese indicate that at the beginning of coreference processing, the only cues that are taken into account are the gender features. Interestingly, feminine and grammatical gender features were responsible for greater influences in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. On the other hand, the structural constraints seem to play a major role at later processing phases. Additionally, an off-line grammatical judgment experiment with the same materials used in the previous experiment was conducted with forty native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. The results confirmed the eye-tracking findings as it seems that the presence of attractors influenced on-line and off-line processing as well as the comprehension of the sentences. Therefore, ungrammatical sentences with attractors were treated as grammatical and grammatical sentences with attractors were treated as ungrammatical. Besides that, ungrammatical sentences were also vulnerable to semantic illusions in the presence of attractors, that is, distractors were retrieved as semantic referents.

What the ‘L?: An ultrasound study of the acoustic and articulatory characteristics of laterals in Brazilian Portuguese

Recent technological and computational advances have enabled researchers to investigate vocal tract articulation and acoustics with an ever-increasing degree of nuance and specificity. This is particularly enlightening in the case of articulations which are subject to tremendous cross-linguistic and interspeaker variability, like laterals (Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996). The current study uses simultaneous 3D ultrasonography and audio recordings to investigate vocal tract configurations and their acoustic consequences, and to provide a comprehensive descriptive analysis of alveolar and palatal lateral speech sounds produced by one Brazilian Portuguese speaker. The results confirm previous accounts of multiple articulatory constrictions and low F1 and F2 frequencies for alveolar laterals (Barbarena et al. 2014; Johnson 2012; Ladefoged 2003; Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996). Novel contributions include (1) identification of a dynamic tongue gesture that, based on a Perturbation Theory analysis (Stevens 1996), appears to directly reflect formant transitions from a preceding vowel to the alveolar lateral consonant, and (2) three-dimensional articulatory descriptions of both alveolar and palatal laterals in Brazilian Portuguese.

Normative Nasalance Scores for Brazilian Portuguese Using New Speech Stimuli

Objective: Normative data were established for newly developed speech materials for nasalance assessment in Brazilian Portuguese. Materials and Methods: Nasalance scores of preexisting passages (oral ZOO-BR, low-pressure oral ZOO-BR2 and NASAL-BR), new nasalance passages (oral Dudu no zoológico, oral Dudu no bosque, oral-nasal O cãozinho Totó and nasal O nenê) and Brasilcleft articulation screening sentences were collected from 245 speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, including 121 males and 124 females, divided into 4 groups: children (5-9 years), adolescents (10-19 years), young adults (20-24 years) and adults (25-35 years). Results: Across all nasalance passages, adult females scored on average 2 percentage points higher than males. Children scored 2-4 percentage points lower than older groups for the preexisting nasalance passages ZOO-BR and ZOO-BR2. Nasalance scores for the new nasalance passages were not significantly different from the preexisting passages. Scores for high-pressure sentences did not differ significantly from the oral nasalance passage Dudu no bosque. Conclusion: The nasalance scores for the new nasalance passages were equivalent to the preexisting materials. The new shortened and simplified nasalance passages will be useful for assessing young children. Normative scores for the Brasilcleft high-pressure sentences were equivalent to the new oral passage Dudu no bosque.

Methods of analysis speech rate: a pilot study.

To describe the performance of fluent adults in different measures of speech rate. The study included 24 fluent adults, of both genders, speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, who were born and still living in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte, state of Minas Gerais, aged between 18 and 59 years. Participants were grouped by age: G1 (18-29 years), G2 (30-39 years), G3 (40-49 years), and G4 (50-59 years). The speech samples were obtained following the methodology of the Speech Fluency Assessment Protocol. In addition to the measures of speech rate proposed by the protocol (speech rate in words and syllables per minute), the rate of speech into phonemes per second and the articulation rate with and without the disfluencies were calculated. We used the nonparametric Friedman test and the Wilcoxon test for multiple comparisons. Groups were compared using the nonparametric Kruskal Wallis. The significance level was of 5%. There were significant differences between measures of speech rate involving syllables. The multiple comparisons showed that all the three measures were different. There was no effect of age for the studied measures. These findings corroborate previous studies. The inclusion of temporal acoustic measures such as speech rate in phonemes per second and articulation rates with and without disfluencies can be a complementary approach in the evaluation of speech rate.

Preliminary stages of a cross-cultural Brazilian Portuguese adaptation of a measurement tool for assessing public understanding of human papillomavirus.

The objective of this study was to conduct the initial stages of the cross-cultural adaptation to Brazilian Portuguese of a scale to measure the level of knowledge about HPV. The stages included: translation from English into the Portuguese spoken in Brazil; synthesis of the translated version; back-translation; analysis by an expert committee; and reliability analysis based on internal consistency and reproducibility. Cronbach's α coefficient for the instrument was 0.985. Subset analysis produced only minor variations. The correlation coefficients between the individual items and the overall result showed strong positive correlations, except for three items. Reproducibility analysis showed kappa values with substantial or moderate agreement for the majority of the items. A preliminary Brazilian version was obtained with satisfactory results, but other stages are necessary in the process of validation of the Brazilian version.

Adaptação transcultural do Self-Evaluation of Communication Experiences after Laryngectomy (SECEL) para o Português Brasileiro

RESUMO Objetivo Adaptar transculturalmente o questionário Self-Evaluation of Communication Experiences after Laryngectomy (SECEL) para o português do Brasil e aplicar esta primeira versão da adaptação em pacientes. Métodos Inicialmente, o instrumento foi traduzido do inglês para o português por um profissional de saúde e por um professor de inglês com experiência em tradução, de forma independente. Ambas as traduções foram semelhantes e usaram palavras e expressões similares. Posteriormente, nova versão foi criada, a partir da compilação das anteriores, e reconvertida para o inglês por um profissional de saúde e um falante do português, que tinha o inglês como língua nativa, também de forma independente. As retrotraduções foram reunidas em um documento único, que foi enviado para o autor que desenvolveu o questionário original. Após a aprovação do autor, o questionário foi aplicado em 39 pacientes submetidos à laringectomia total, com, pelo menos, um ano de pós-operatório. Resultados O primeiro bloco do questionário – Questões Gerais – revelou-se menos adequado; o segundo bloco de questões – Aspectos Ambientais – apresentou alta correção e o terceiro – Questões Atitudinais – apresentou a maior correlação. Conclusão O primeiro passo da validação do questionário em português – tradução, adaptação cultural e análise preliminar dos resultados, identificando falhas nas perguntas – foi realizado. A nova proposta, após o pré-teste do instrumento, foi apresentada para aplicação em uma população representativa do Brasil.

Portuguese Lexical Clusters and CVC Sequences in Speech Perception and Production

Thi s paper investigates similarities between lexical consonant clusters and CVC sequences differing in the presence or absence of a lexical vowel in speech perception and production in two Portuguese varieties. The frequent high vowel deletion in the European variety (EP) and the realization of intervening vocalic elements between lexical clusters in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) may minimize the contrast between lexical clusters and CVC sequences in the two Portuguese varieties. In order to test this hypothesis we present a perception experiment with 72 participants and a physiological analysis of 3-dimensional movement data from 5 EP and 4 BP speakers. The perceptual results confirmed a gradual confusion of lexical clusters and CVC sequences in EP, which corresponded roughly to the gradient consonantal overlap found in production.

Electroglottography of speakers of Brazilian Portuguese through Objective Multiparameter Vocal Assessment (EVA)

AbstractEVA was designed to study various speech production parameters.Objective: This paper aims to define the mean values for electroglottography tests of Brazilian Portuguese speakers on EVA.Materials and Method: The voices of 20 men and 20 women without voice-related complaints were analyzed through electroglottography so as to obtain reference values for normality. Case study: this is a descriptive cross-sectional study.Results: The mean values for normal male voices were: F0 = 127.77 Hz; F0 coefficient of variation = 2.51%; absolute jitter = 1.707 Hz; relative average perturbation = 0.0083; jitter factor = 1.34%; jitter ratio = 13.45%; QF = 0.447. The values for female voices were: F0 = 204.87 Hz; F0 coefficient of variation = 1.58%; absolute jitter = 3.30Hz; relative average perturbation = 0.0102; jitter factor = 1.60%; jitter ratio = 16.23%; QF = 0.443. Wave type for the entire sample was categorized as tilted pulse.Conclusion: Statistically significant differences were found for gender on parameters average F0 and absolute jitter. While using acoustic analysis software, users must be based on parameters inherent to the software program when analyzing the collected data.

The L2 perception of initial English /h/ and /ɹ/ by Brazilian Portuguese learners of English

This study investigates how speakers who speak Brazilian Portuguese as their first language and English as their second language perceive the English phonemes /h/ and /ɹ/, and how they and monolingual Brazilian Portuguese speakers map these phonemes onto Portuguese sound categories. Participants took part in three experiments: an AXB discrimination test, an identification test, and a cross-language assimilation test, which was also taken by monolinguals. Lower and higher proficiency groups were able to hear the distinction acoustically, but only the higher proficiency group used the distinction to identify English words. Monolingual Brazilian Portuguese speakers and the higher proficiency group assimilated English /h/ primarily to Portuguese /h/. However, the phonological environment had an effect for monolinguals, but not for the higher proficiency group. The lower proficiency group, which one might expect to fall in between these two groups, showed a failure to assimilate English sounds to the Portuguese categories.

Pragmatic orientation of syntax in spontaneous speech: A corpus-based comparison between Brazilian Portuguese and Italian adverbial clauses

This paper reports on the syntax of finite adverbial clauses in spoken Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Italian (IT), based on C-ORAL-BRASIL and Italian C-ORAL-ROM corpora and founded onLanguage into Act Theory (L-AcT: Cresti 2000). The analysis of adverbial clauses here is mainly focused on the syntax/pragmatics and syntax/information structure interfaces, aiming to show significant differences in the syntax of spoken versus written language.

Analysis of prototypical narratives produced by aphasic individuals and cognitively healthy subjects.

Aphasia can globally or selectively affect comprehension and production of verbal and written language. Discourse analysis can aid language assessment and diagnosis.Objective[1] To explore narratives that produce a number of valid indicators for diagnosing aphasia in speakers of Brazilian Portuguese.[2] To analyze the macrostructural aspects of the discourse of normal individuals.[3] To analyze the macrostructural aspects of the discourse of aphasic individuals.MethodsThe macrostructural aspects of three narratives produced by aphasic individuals and cognitively healthy subjects were analyzed.ResultsA total of 30 volunteers were examined comprising 10 aphasic individuals (AG) and 20 healthy controls (CG). The CG included 5 males. The CG had a mean age of 38.9 years (SD=15.61) and mean schooling of 13 years (SD=2.67) whereas the AG had a mean age of 51.7 years (SD=17.3) and mean schooling of 9.1 years (SD=3.69). Participants were asked to narrate three fairy tales as a basis for analyzing the macrostructure of discourse. Comparison of the three narratives revealed no statistically significant difference in number of propositions produced by the groups. A significant negative correlation was found between age and number of propositions produced. Also, statistically significant differences were observed in the number of propositions produced by the individuals in the CG and the AG for the three tales.ConclusionIt was concluded that the three tales are applicable for discourse assessment, containing a similar number of propositions and differentiating aphasic individuals and cognitively healthy subjects based on analysis of the macrostructure of discourse.

Caribbean Spanish = Brazilian Portuguese? Some comparative thoughts on the loss ofpro-drop

AbstractThe present contribution compares Caribbean Spanish (CS), especially the Dominican variant (DS), and Brazilian Portuguese (BP). These dialects, which show several similarities with respect to the loss ofpro-drop(and related grammatical features), are described in a framework based on Toribio (1996, 2000): both in CS/DS and in BP the inflectional head seems to partly have lost not only its capacity of identifying the contents of a null pronoun, but also the possibility to assign nominative Case in a rightward direction. Speakers of BP have replaced the morphology-based identification mechanism by a special kind of antecedent identification, and it is argued that their competence is expanded by a “grammatical bolt-on” along the lines of Rowlett (2013). The situation in DS is much more complex due to the fact that null subjects are still possible in virtually all contexts where General Spanish has them. Although antecedent identification is a plausible mechanism (attested in other languages, for instance Icelandic and Russian), there is no conclusive evidence that it is at work in DS. Furthermore, and in contrast to BP, contact with, and exposure to, an educated variety of the language can hardly be made responsible for the actual variation in DS, with the exception of the use ofelloas an overt expletive, which is disfavoured by more educated, urban speakers.The paper discusses also alternative proposals to the “competing grammars model” (cf. Toribio 2000) for DS, especially Holmberg et al.’s (2009) explanation for the partial null subject status of BP and other languages. Apart from exhibiting theoretical problems, it fails to do justice to the actual language variation in BP and is incompatible with the DS data. On the other hand, Sessarego and Gutiérrez-Rexach’s (in press) model for Chinchano Spanish (an Afro-Hispanic dialect spoken in Peru), which is based on the idea that input consisting of variable L2 outputs is responsible for variation in L1, may be promising, if similar acquisition processes can be established to have taken place in the dialects under scrutiny. For the moment, however, there is still some mystery about the partialpro-dropnature of CS/DS.

Features of Portuguese as a heritage language: Morphosyntax and beyond

AbstractThis paper reviews findings about linguistic features of Portuguese as a heritage language (PHL) in contact with English and German. The paper reviews some of the issues that have been uncovered in relation to morphosyntatic and sociopragmatic knowledge among heritage speakers of European and Brazilian Portuguese. The paper also discusses a few possible directions for future research in PHL that might shed light on morphosyntactic issues and on whether certain features illustrate examples of attrition or incomplete acquisition.

Brazilian Portuguese noun phrases: An optimality theoretic perspective

In this paper we examine the nominal system in Brazilian Portuguese (BrP), a challenge to cross-linguistic studies which rely on the generalization that a language that has indefinites should not have bare nouns. BrP has bare singulars, bare plurals, singular and plural indefinites. We examine the behavior of these phrases, mostly in object position of episodic predicates, and propose that each has a different semantics. The nominal system of BrP can be successfully explained, we argue, within the bi-directional Optimality Theory (biOT) theoretical framework developed by Hendriks et al. (2010). This approach allows us to describe and explain patterns of competition, and accounts for language variation by constraint reranking. For BrP, we propose the synchronic coexistence of two grammars: bare plurals appear in the formal variety of BrP that maintains plural agreement, and bare singulars appear in informal spoken BrP, along with plural definites and indefinites that lack plural agreement on the noun. Under this analysis, BPs denote inclusive plurals, while BSs get a non-atomic semantics that covers both mass and plural interpretations.

Nasalização em português brasileiro: uma (re)visão autossegmental

We propose to make a brief review on nasalization phenomena studies in Portuguese, aiming the phonological process of nasal harmonization that occurs in the variety of Brazilian Portuguese spoken in Vitoria da Conquista-BA and region, a phenomenon hitherto not described for any Portuguese dialect. To do so, we consider as fundamental, D’Angelis (2002) analysis, which incorporates relevant concepts presented by Trubetzkoy, from the Prague School, and some points of Camara Jr. propose. We also propose to update the discussion with the approaches along the lines of auto segmental phonology, incorporating some insights of Piggott (1992), discussing with other analyzes for nasalization phenomena in other languages, especially Guarani (language of Tupi-Guarani Linguistic Family), as proposed by Costa (2010), which deals with the phonological processes involving nasality and nasal harmony in Brazilian indigenous languages , in order to verify if the researches on nasality phenomena in other languages can shed some light on the processes that occur in Portuguese.

Adaptation and cross-cultural validation of the Brazilian version of the Warwick-Edinburgh mental well-being scale.

the Warwick-Edinburgh mental well-being scale (WEMWBS) was designed to assess the level of mental well-being of a population or specific groups. The scale consists of 14 items covering functional psychological aspects, as well as well-being. The final score is calculated by adding up the response of each item, ranging from 1 to 5, obtaining a result from 14 to 70 points. the procedure was developed in accordance with the protocol recommended by the World Health Organization covering translation, back translation, semantic equivalence, expert evaluation of the previous steps, pre-test and final version of the instrument. Following, the final version was applied to a sample of 122 individuals and the data were subjected to descriptive statistical analysis, factor analysis, internal consistency and correlation with other validated instruments. we performed the instrument's adaptation to the Portuguese spoken in Brazil, replacing terms to approximate the language to expressions of everyday life. The final version showed similar results to those from the original version, demonstrated by factor analysis, internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha: 0.89) and positive correlation with instruments validated to the Portuguese language. the Brazilian version of the WEMWBS proved to be easy to use and understand, showed high internal consistency and construct validity similar to the original instrument.