This paper examines four acoustic correlates of vowel identity in Brazilian and EuropeanPortuguese: first formant (F1), second formant (F2), duration, and fundamental frequency (F0).Both varieties of Portuguese display some cross-linguistically common phenomena: vowelintrinsic duration, vowel-intrinsic pitch, gender-dependent size of the vowel space, genderdependent duration, and a skewed symmetry in F1 between front and back vowels. Also, the average difference between the vocal tract sizes associated with /i/ and /u/, as measured from formant analyses, is comparable to the average difference between male and female vocal tract sizes. A language-specific phenomenon is that in both varieties of Portuguese the vowel-intrinsic duration effect is larger than in many other languages. Differences between Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) are found in duration (BP has longer stressed vowels than EP), in F1 (the lower mid front vowel approaches its higher mid counterpart more closely in EP than in BP), and in the size of the intrinsic pitch effect (larger for BP than for EP).

These results indicate that abnormalities in prosody processing occur at the three stages of EP processing, and are enhanced in SSC. Correlations between P200 amplitude for happy prosody and delusions suggest a role that abnormalities in the processing of emotionally salient acoustic cues may play in schizophrenia symptomatology. Correlations between ERP and behavioral data point to a relationship between early sensory abnormalities and prosody recognition in schizophrenia.

This study examined the role of phonological and orthographic overlap in the recognition of cognate words by recording electrophysiological and behavioral data. One hundred and ninety-two words were selected: 96 cognate words listed according to their phonological and orthographic overlap vs. 96 noncognate words. Twenty-four proficient European Portuguese-English bilinguals performed a silent reading task with a masked priming paradigm. The results showed that phonology interacts with semantic activation at N400 modulations. Phonological priming effects were dependent on the orthographic overlap of cognate words. Thus, the distinctive processing of cognate words seems to be due to their cross-linguistic similarity, which is consistent with a localist connectionist account on cognate representation and processing.

Background Abnormalities in emotional prosody processing have been consistently reported in schizophrenia and are related to poor social outcomes. However, the role of stimulus complexity in abnormal emotional prosody processing is still unclear. Method We recorded event-related potentials in 16 patients with chronic schizophrenia and 16 healthy controls to investigate: 1) the temporal course of emotional prosody processing; 2) the relative contribution of prosodic and semantic cues in emotional prosody processing. Stimuli were prosodic single words presented in two conditions: with intelligible (semantic content condition–SCC) and unintelligible semantic content (pure prosody condition–PPC). Results Relative to healthy controls, schizophrenia patients showed reduced P50 for happy PPC words, and reduced N100 for both neutral and emotional SCC words and for neutral PPC stimuli. Also, increased P200 was observed in schizophrenia for happy prosody in SCC only. Behavioral results revealed higher error rates in schizophrenia for angry prosody in SCC and for happy prosody in PPC. Conclusions Together, these data further demonstrate the interactions between abnormal sensory processes and higher-order processes in bringing about emotional prosody processing dysfunction in schizophrenia. They further suggest that impaired emotional prosody processing is dependent on stimulus complexity.

These results suggest that abnormalities in higher order processes (evaluation of the salience of a speech stimulus) modulate impaired self-other voice discrimination in schizophrenia. Abnormal processing of negative self-generated speech may play a role in the experience of AVH.