 | Prosody |
Head: Marina Vigário and Sónia Frota
European Portuguese is one of the languages which is particularly interesting to the study of prosody and of the perception and production of prosodic properties. This is due to the fact that (i) European Portuguese is different from other Romance languages in terms of the properties it displays in various prosodic levels, such as the Prosodic Word or the Phonological Phrase, (ii) its intonation stands out from the rest of the Romance languages due to the scarcity of pitch accents and its overall prosodic phrasing, and (iii) it has a rare combination of syllabic and accentual rhythmic properties, within Romance. The presence of both Romance and Germanic-like properties in the prosody of the language raises challenging questions for language acquisition (under the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis) and for language typology. The research developed at LabFon aims at tackling some of these questions in the broader context of cross-linguistic research, focusing on prosodic variation, the acquisition of prosody and the role of prosody in language development and language processing.
Research is carried out along two major lines:
Prosody
Portuguese prosody and the prosody of Romance languages (data collecting and analysis of utterances from a comparative stance)
Prosodic variation
Perceiving and Processing prosodic properties
Resources:
Interactive Atlas of the Prosody of Portuguese (InAPoP)
Interactive Atlas of the Romance Intonantion (IARI)
