The present study conducted a preliminary examination of the psychometric properties of a recently developed Portuguese translation of the Acceptance of Cosmetic Surgery Scale (ACSS; Henderson-King & Henderson-King, 2005). A total of 311 Brazilian adults completed the ACSS along with Portuguese translations of measures of actual-ideal body weight discrepancy, body appreciation, sociocultural at...

This paper presents research results on new syllable structures for the Portuguese language. The location of the syllable boundaries is a well known problem of nonconsensual resolution in Portuguese, mainly when the acoustic-phonetic constraints are taken into account. Based on various acoustic-phonetic restrictions of Portuguese speech, new syllable splitting rules were studied in a corpus of ...

In the late nineties, access to Portuguese data in electronic form was scarce, and was considered one of the bottlenecks limiting the advance of natural language processing of Portuguese (Santos, 1999a), so Linguateca’s launching of AC/DC i had as purpose to significantly increase the amount of data – and its quality, in that the data was annotated and classified. To the best of my knowledge, A...

One of the major obstacles in deploying spoken language technologies (SLTs) in the developing world is a lack of key linguistic resources – e.g. electronic dictionaries, phonetically aligned corpora, pronunciation lexicons, etc. – that describe the non-dominant varieties spoken in such countries and regions. In this paper, we describe the work of the LUPo (Portuguese Unisyn Lexicon) project to ...

Previous studies have established a correlation beween early clitic omission and the existence of past participle agreement, explainable with a maturational constraint – the UCC. Since Portuguese doesn’t show past participle agreement, it is expected that portuguese children will produce clitics early on. I order to find out whether this correlation holds for Portuguese, an experimental study w...

This paper describes one aspect of an ongoing work to incorporate pronunciation variability in the Portuguese (PORT) speech system. This work focuses on the linguistic rules to improve the grapheme-(multi)phone transcription algorithm that will be implemented. Portuguese ‘Beira Interior’ regional speech (PORT-BI REG) is considered to be in the realm of coarticulation (post-lexical) phenomena. A...

The cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the Sniffin`Sticks test for the Portuguese population is described. Over 270 people participated in four experiments. In Experiment 1, 67 participants rated the familiarity of presented odors and seven descriptors of the original test were adapted to a Portuguese context. In Experiment 2, the Portuguese version of Sniffin`Sticks test was administe...

The present study investigates the realization of informationseeking yes-no questions in two contact varieties, Olivenza Portuguese and Olivenza Spanish, in comparison with Castilian Spanish. We aim to: (1) describe the use of prenuclear pitch accents and nuclear configurations and the durational properties of prenuclear, nuclear, and IP-final syllables in this sentence type; (2) compare the in...

Current automatic transcription technology applied to media contents is an important medium that not only allows generating subtitles, but also enables data search and retrieval capabilities over multimedia streams. Among others, one of the most important challenges that transcription systems have to deal with is speaker accent variability. In this work we study the importance of accent variabi...

In this article we present an exploratory approach to enrich a WordNet-like lexical ontology with the synonyms present in a standard monolingual Portuguese dictionary. The dictionary was converted from PDF into XML and senses were automatically identified and annotated. This allowed us to extract them, independently of definitions, and to create sets of synonyms (synsets). These synsets were th...