Some long-standing issues in Portuguese phonology revisited in the laboratory

Abstract

This editorial to the Special Collection Laboratory Approaches to Portuguese Phonology aims at contextualizing the articles against the background of a two-century old scholarly tradition in the study of the Portuguese sound pattern. As foreseen in the Call for Papers, all the submissions received used laboratory methods to address long-standing issues raised by this tradition. Regardless of their publication order, the articles can be grouped into four topics: vowel variability, stress/stress-grouping, nasality, and fricative variability. Brief highlights on the works that paved the way for the state-of-the art in such topics are followed by comments on the gains introduced by the laboratory approach. Hopefully, this overview will help authors and readers evaluate the opportunities for further research along the lines indicated by the current results.