On the correlates of rhythmic distinctions: The European/Brazilian Portuguese case

Abstract

Although European and Brazilian Portuguese have long been considered to belong to different rhythmic types, no clear support for this distinction has been given. In agreement with recent proposals for other languages, this paper presents an account of Portuguese rhythm based on acoustic measures of consonantal and vocalic intervals, and explores the relation between these measures and the phonological properties specific to the European and Brazilian varieties (EP and BP). The approach followed is both successful in providing evidence for the rhythmic distinction between the two varieties and in relating it to the traditional rhythm typology. Overall, the results show that EP and BP have clearly distinct mixed rhythms: stress-and syllable-timing characterise EP, whereas syllable and mora-timing characterise BP. The data further suggest that mixed rhythm is not equivalent to intermediate rhythm, thus supporting the notion of rhythmic classes against the scattering of languages along a rhythmic continuum.

Phonological development in relation to native language and literacy: Variations on a theme in six alphabetic orthographies

“…Speech rhythm will be considered here as one linguistic characteristic that might create variation. The existing literature consistently distinguishes syllable-timed French and Spanish from stress-timed English (e.g., Dauer, 1983;Prieto et al, 2012;Ramus et al, 1999) and most often places European Portuguese and Greek in an intermediate category (Dauer, 1983;Frota & Vigário, 2001;Grabe & Low, 2002). Icelandic has not yet been classified, and while its Germanic origin and complex syllables suggest stresstiming, the absence of vowel reduction plus fixed lexical stress contribute to a mixed profile (Table 1).…”

Phonotactic and phrasal properties of speech rhythm. Evidence from Catalan, English, and Spanish

“…Yet consistent crosslinguistic differences were obtained in our experiment. Particularly telling in this respect are the results from cross-dialectal studies that have begun to uncover differences in rhythm within a given language (Low et al (2000) for the Singapore and British varieties of English, Frota and Vigário (2001) for the European and Brazilian varieties of Portuguese, O'Rourke (2008) for the Lima and Cuzco varieties of Spanish, Nolan and Asu (2009) for Peninsular Spanish and Mexican Spanish, and White et al, 2009 for northern and southern varieties of Italian, among others). Though many of these dialectal varieties share key phonotactic properties like syllable structure and vowel reduction, they display important rhythmic differences, as evident from both the metrics and perceptual evaluation.…”

“…The materials used by these studies are argued to typically reflect the language-specific phonological properties of the language being investigated (e.g., Carter, 2005;O'Rourke, 2008;Nolan and Asu, 2009 for Spanish, Frota and Vigário, 2001 for European and Brazilian Portuguese, Asu and Nolan, 2006 for Estonian, Mattys, 2007a,b for Dutch, French, English, andSpanish, andRusso andBarry, 2008 for Italian and Dutch, among others). Among the phonological properties that are related to rhythm, syllable structure is one of the most frequently and reliably cited.…”

Creating and Validating Multilingual Semantic Representations for Six Languages: Expert versus Non-Expert Crowds

“…It should be noted that the gold standard tags were selected and manually checked by a Brazilian Portuguese native speaker expert. There is a difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese which could result in ambiguous words for speakers from the two regions (Frota and Vigário, 2001). In order to allow better interpretation of the nonexperts' scores, we repeated the experiments on a smaller scale with up to four experts per language (English, Arabic, Chinese and Urdu), who were already familiar with the USAS taxonomy and were researchers in the fields of corpus or computational linguistics.…”