In this article, we present Procura-PALavras (P-PAL), a Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese (EP) lexical database. Based on a contemporary printed corpus of over 227 million words, P-PAL provides a broad range of word attributes and statistics, including several measures of word frequency (e.g., raw counts, per-million word frequency, logarithmic Zipf scale), morpho-syntactic information (e.g., parts of speech [PoSs], grammatical gender and number, dominant PoS, and frequency and relative frequency of the dominant PoS), as well as several lexical and sublexical orthographic (e.g., number of letters; consonant-vowel orthographic structure; density and frequency of orthographic neighbors; orthographic Levenshtein distance; orthographic uniqueness point; orthographic syllabification; and trigram, bigram, and letter type and token frequencies), and phonological measures (e.g., pronunciation, number of phonemes, stress, density and frequency of phonological neighbors, transposed and phonographic neighbors, syllabification, and biphone and phone type and token frequencies) for ~53,000 lemmatized and ~208,000 nonlemmatized EP word forms. To obtain these metrics, researchers can choose between two word queries in the application: (i) analyze words previously selected for specific attributes and/or lexical and sublexical characteristics, or (ii) generate word lists that meet word requirements defined by the user in the menu of analyses. For the measures it provides and the flexibility it allows, P-PAL will be a key resource to support research in all cognitive areas that use EP verbal stimuli. P-PAL is freely available at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/tools .

Very few studies exist on the role of cross-language similarities in cognate word acquisition. Here we sought to explore, for the first time, the interplay of orthography (O) and phonology (P) during the early stages of cognate word acquisition, looking at children and adults with the same level of foreign language proficiency, and by using two variants of the word-association learning paradigm (auditory learning method vs. auditory + written method). Eighty participants (forty children and forty adults, native speakers of European Portuguese [EP]), learned a set of EP-Catalan cognate words and non-cognate words. Among the cognate words, the degree of orthographic and phonological similarity was manipulated. Half of the children and adult participants learned the new words via an L2 auditory and written-L1 word association method, while the other half learned the same words only through an L2 auditory-L1 word association method. Both groups were tested in an auditory recognition task and a go/no-go lexical decision task. Results revealed a disadvantage for children in comparison to adults, which was reduced in the auditory learning method. Furthermore, there was an advantage for cognates relative to non-cognates regardless of the age of participants. Importantly, there were modulations in cognate word processing as a function of the degree of O and P overlap which were restricted to children. The findings are discussed in light of the most relevant bilingual models of word recognition.

The present study examined whether heritage speakers (HSs) of European Portuguese (EP) who were born or moved to a German-speaking country before the age of eight years were perceived as native speakers of EP. In particular, this study intended to determine whether a change of linguistic environment, length of residence in a migrant context, length of residence in the country of origin before migration and after remigration, and age at return could predict the degree of (non)native accent in the heritage language. Thirty native Portuguese speakers assessed the global accent of 20 Portuguese-German bilinguals, five Portuguese monolinguals and five highly proficient German speakers of Portuguese as a second language (L2). The group of HSs comprised 17 speakers who returned to Portugal. The results revealed that listeners perceived a strong global foreign accent in the speech of the L2 learners, while the monolingual Portuguese speakers were clearly perceived as being native speakers of EP. The HSs’ ratings were considerably closer to the monolingual average ratings, but they showed more variation, indicating that their accent may bear non-native traces. Further analyses showed that the age at which the HSs emigrated was the only significant predictor, while length of residence in the host country and in Portugal were less predictive.

This study reports the results of a perceptual assimilation task (PAT) used to assess the degree of perceived cross-language (dis)similarity between the vowel inventories of European Portuguese (L1) and American English (L2) and, thus, predict difficulty in the perception and production of non-native vowels. Thirty-four native European Portuguese speakers completed a PAT, in which they mapped both L2 English and L1 Portuguese vowels to native vowel categories and rated them for goodness-of-fit to L1 vowels. The results are discussed in terms of theoretical models of cross-language perception and L2 speech learning (SLM, Flege, 1995, & PAM-L2, Best & Tyler, 2007).-----------------------------------------------------------------------------CATEGORIZAÇÃO PERCEPTIVA DE VOGAIS INGLESAS POR FALANTES NATIVOS DE PORTUGUÊS EUROPEUEste estudo reporta os resultados de uma tarefa de assimilação percetiva, usada para avaliar o grau de semelhança inter-linguística entre os inventários vocálicos de português europeu (L1) e de inglês americano (L2), e, assim, prever dificuldades na perceção e produção de sons não nativos. Trinta e quatro falantes nativos de português europeu completaram uma tarefa de assimilação perceptiva, na qual identificaram vogais do inglês (L2) e do português (L1) de acordo com as categorias fonológicas da sua língua nativa, avaliando também a qualidade de representatividade categorial. Os resultados são discutidos partindo de dois modelos de perceção inter-linguística e aprendizagem de fala L2 (SLM, Flege, 1995, & PAM-L2, Best & Tyler, 2007).---Original em inglês.