Mistakes involving medicine brand names may lead to serious medication errors and even patients’ death. We tested the effect of medicine brand names shape – native vs. non-native spelling – in two groups of Portuguese speaking subjects: (i) pharmacy clients (older and less educated); (ii)… read more
Glide insertion to breakhiatus has long been reported in the literature to occur in the Northern and Central varieties of Portuguese but this has not been systematically investigated before. From a larger corpus of speech material collected in several locations in the North and Center of Portugal,… read more
Studies of emerging prosody from the word to the phrase, integrating various sources of evidence, are scarce, and our understanding of the pathways of prosodic development is still very limited. An investigation of emerging intonation and prosodic phrasing was undertaken on the basis of production… read more
The prosodic change that has been reported to have occurred from Classical to Modern Portuguese is investigated by means of a new approach to the study of rhythm in language change. Assuming that rhythm is a by-product of the presence/absence of a set of properties in a given linguistic system, we… read more
This paper examines the phonetics and phonology of intonational boundaries in five Romance languages/varieties. A typology of the boundary cues used is given, as well as their relative frequency. The phonology of the tonal boundary gesture is described by means of the inventory of nuclear accents… read more