European Portuguese Language Research Articles

Affective prosody in European Portuguese: Perceptual and acoustic characterization of one-word utterances

A perceptual and acoustic characterization was provided on the expression of liking and disliking in the European Portuguese language. Thirty participants identified vocal patterns and judged the intensity of expressed affect in one-word items recorded by six untrained speakers. Listeners consistently associated vocal profiles with the two emotional patterns of liking and disliking. However, liking intonation was easier to recognize than disliking intonation. The feature most commonly associated with liking intonation was a wider and higher F0 pattern and a rising-falling contour. For disliking, the results revealed a flatter melodic pattern with a fall into the stressed syllable yielding a low plateau. In sum, both prosodic patterns showed different and consistent correlates.

Cross-cultural Adaptation and Validation of the Quebec Back Pain Disability Scale to European Portuguese Language

Cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric testing. To conduct the cross-cultural adaptation of the Quebec Back Pain Disability Scale (QBPDS) and investigate its reliability and validity in patients with chronic low back pain (CLBP). The QBPDS is one of the most commonly used scales to evaluate functional incapacity resulting from low back pain. Although measuring disability is an important outcome in physiotherapy care, there is no previous research relating to the cultural adaptation and psychometric testing of the QBPDS in the Portuguese-speaking population. The questionnaire was first translated and back-translated in accordance with the published guidelines. The Portuguese version of the QBPDS was then pilot tested in a Portuguese sample of 40 patients with CLBP. Psychometric properties were evaluated in a new sample of 132 patients with CLBP. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to confirm its unidimensionality. Reliability was evaluated through internal consistency and reproducibility, using the Cronbach α and intraclass correlation coefficient, respectively. Construct validity was assessed with correlations between the QBPDS and the Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire and between the QBPDS and the visual analogue pain scale for convergent validity and pain localization for discriminative validity, using the Spearman correlation analysis and the Mann-Whitney test. Exploratory factor analysis revealed the existence of one major factor that explains 52.1% of the variance. One-week test-retest reliability was 0.7, and internal consistency was 0.95. The QBPDS correlated strongly with the Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire (0.62; P < 0.001), moderately with pain (0.38; P < 0.001), and shows capability to discriminate between patients with localized and referred pain (U = 1218; P < 0.0005). The reliability and construct validity of the Portuguese version of the QBPDS are acceptable to assess functional status of Portuguese-speaking patients with CLBP. .

1439 Psychometric Properties of ALPE - Language Test (Teste De Linguagem-ALPE, TL-ALPE)

ALPE - Language Test (Teste de Linguagem-ALPE, TL-ALPE) is a standardized receptive and expressive European-Portuguese (EP) language assessment instrument of to be used in pre-school age children in order to assess their semantic, morphosyntax and metalinguistic skills development. This paper describes the psychometric properties of TL-ALPE, i.e., - reliability (internal consistency, inter- and intra-judge reliability) and validity (content and construct validity). In order to standardize the TLALPE, 817 children (402 females and 415 males) with ages between [3;0-5;12[ were assessed across Portuguese mainland and islands. The TL-ALPE was applied by 42 trained and fully licensed SLPs. Preliminary results provided normative data about the EP speaking children: standardized norms (mean, standard deviation and percentile ranks). Results indicate that TL-ALPE presented a strong cohesion among the items analysed, a strong equivalence between the analysis performed by independent judges, and also a strong stability in the analysis performed by the same judge. Also seems to exist a strong correlation between TLALPE's data and those obtained in other EP studies (construct validity). TL-ALPE adequately measured the child's receptive and expressive language skills (content validity). In conclusion, the analysis of the preliminary results showed that TL-ALPE was a valid and reliable assessment instrument and can be used for early identification of oral language disorders.

Dynamic language modeling for European Portuguese

This paper reports on the work done on vocabulary and language model daily adaptation for a European Portuguese broadcast news transcription system. The proposed adaptation framework takes into consideration European Portuguese language characteristics, such as its high level of inflection and complex verbal system. A multi-pass speech recognition framework using contemporary written texts available daily on the Web is proposed. It uses morpho-syntactic knowledge (part-of-speech information) about an in-domain training corpus for daily selection of an optimal vocabulary. Using an information retrieval engine and the ASR hypotheses as query material, relevant documents are extracted from a dynamic and large-size dataset to generate a story-based language model. When applied to a daily and live closed-captioning system of live TV broadcasts, it was shown to be effective, with a relative reduction of out-of-vocabulary word rate (69%) and WER (12.0%) when compared to the results obtained by the baseline system with the same vocabulary size.

Operações e paradigmas genolexicais do português

Based on the distinctions between genolexical processes and word formation rules we characterize the mains genolexical processes Portuguese language activates, and we identify and describe some of the most relevant word formation rules of the european Portuguese language.