LabFon - Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology

LabPhon Website

 

The Phonetics and Phonology Lab (LabFon - Laboratório de Fonética e Fonologia) is a research group that was founded in the 1960s in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. In 2005-2006 the group became a part of Onset (Center for Language Studies, FLUL) and in 2007 the group has joined the Center of Linguistics of the University of Lisbon. In line with the past history of the Lab, nowadays LabFon pursues its activities with three aims: (1) research (especially laboratory-phonology oriented), (2) education/training (at the undergraduate and graduate levels), and (3) services to the community.
In the last three years, two main lines of research have been developed: the study of frequency patterns in the phonology and phonetics of the language, and the study of the production and perception of prosody (prosodic phrasing, intonation, and rhythm). 
Knowledge of frequency patterns has been shown to be crucial to the characterization of language usage, the establishing of lexical representations, or the emergence and development of grammar. Available frequency data for phonological units and patterns in Portuguese was scarce, non-replicable and corpus dependent. The line of research initiated in 2007 aimed at providing large-scale frequency information for phonological units and patterns from the feature to the prosodic word level, together with tools and databases, that allowed a description of Portuguese from the frequency perspective and enabled to test hypothesis about frequency effects in adult and child grammar, as well as language processing.
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. To this end, the group set up in 2010 the Lisbon Baby Lab.

 

Artigo em Atas
Correia, S., Frota, S., Butler, J., & Vigário, M. (2013). Word stress perception in European Portuguese. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2013).
Frota, S., Butler, J., Correia, S., Severino, C., & Vigário, M. (2012). Pitch First, Stress Next? Prosodic Effects on Word Learning in a Intonation Language. In Proceedings of the 36th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development edited by Alia K. Biller, Esther Y. Chung, and Amelia E. Kimball (pp. 190-201). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Filipe, M. G., Vicente, S. G., & Frota, S. (2012). Aquisição prosódica entre os 4 e os 18 anos de idade [Prosodic acquisition from 4 to 18 years]. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of Psychology and Education (pp. 444-458).
Jordão, R., & Frota, S. (2010). The intonational phrase constrains coda development. In Language Acquisition and Development. Proceedings of GALA 2009. A. Castro, J. Costa, M. Lobo & F. Pratas. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars.
Prieto, P., D’Imperio, M., Elordieta, G., Frota, S., & Vigário, M. (2006). Evidence for soft preplanning in tonal production: Initial scaling in Romance. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2006 (pp. 803-806). R. Hoffmann & H. Mixdorff. TUDpress Verlag der Wissenschaften GmbH: Dresden.
Frota, S., Vigário, M., & Martins, F. (2006). FreP: An Electronic Tool for Extracting Frequency Information of Phonological Units from Portuguese Written Text. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. Genoa.
Vigário, M., Martins, F., & Frota, S. (2005). Frequências no Português: a ferramenta FreP. In Actas do XX Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística (pp. 897-908). APL/Colibri: Lisboa.
Elordieta, G., Frota, S., Prieto, P., & Vigário, M. (2003). Effects of constituent length and syntactic branching on intonational phrasing in Ibero-Romance. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 487-490). M. J. Solé, D. Recasens & I. Romero. Barcelona: UAB.
Vigário, M., Frota, S., & Freitas, M. J. (2003). From signal to grammar: Rhythm and the acquisition of syllable structure. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 809-821). Dommerville, Massachusetts: Cascadilla Press.
Frota, S. (2002). The Prosody of Focus: a Case-Study with Cross-Linguistic Implications. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2002 (pp. 319-322).
Frota, S., Vigário, M., & Martins, F. (2002). Language Discrimination and Rhythm Classes: Evidence from Portuguese. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2002 (pp. 315-318).
Frota, S., Vigário, M., & Martins, F. (2002). Discriminação entre línguas: evidência para classes rítmicas. In Actas do XVII Encontro da APL (pp. 189-199). Lisboa: APL/Colibri.
Frota, S., & Vigário, M. (2000). Aspectos de prosódia comparada: ritmo e entoação no PE e no PB. In Actas do XV Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística (Vol. 1, pp. 533-555). Coimbra: APL.
Barros, N., & Frota, S. (2015). Prosodic Phrasing in parentheticals and topics across varieties of European Portuguese. In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015, Glasgow, UK: University of Glasgow. Retrieved from http://www.icphs2015.info/pdfs/Papers/ICPHS0439.pdf
Castelo, J., & Frota, S. (2015). Variação entoacional no Português do Brasil: uma análise fonológica do contorno nuclear em enunciados declarativos e interrogativos. In XXX Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística. Textos Selecionados (A. Moreno, F. Silva & J. Veloso, pp. 113-131). Porto: APL.
Cruz, M., Swerts, M., & Frota, S. (2015). Variation in tone and gesture within language. In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 ed.). Glasgow, UK: The University of Glasgow. Retrieved from http://www.icphs2015.info/pdfs/Papers/ICPHS0452.pdf
Franco, D., Fragoso, I., Teles, J., & Martins, F. (2015). Impacto da composição corporal e do somatótipo na produção de vogais: resultados preliminares de trabalho de investigação aplicado ao português europeu. In Atas do I Simpósio Ibero-Americano de Motricidade Orofacial (SIAMO (pp. 140-141). Lisboa: Instituto EPAP.
Franco, D., Andrea, M., Fragoso, M. I., Teles, J., & Martins, F. (2015). Consequências da composição da massa corporal na produção do Português Europeu: estudo de resultados preliminares. In XXX Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística. Textos Selecionados (A. Moreno, F. Silva & J. Veloso, pp. 321-333). Porto: APL.
Paulino, N., & Frota, S. (2015). Variação prosódica no Português Europeu: Análise comparada de fenómenos de sândi vocálico. In XXX Encontro da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística. Textos Seleccionados (A. Moreno, F. Silva & J. Veloso, pp. 435-448). Porto: APL.
Sundara, M., Molnar, M., & Frota, S. (2015). English-learning infants’ perception of boundary tones. In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 ed.). Glasgow, UK: The University of Glasgow. Retrieved from http://www.icphs2015.info/pdfs/Papers/ICPHS0361.pdf
Franco, D. (2016). Safety culture of the patient: a reflexion about the therapeutic approach on the patient with vocal pathology. In .. Portugal. Retrieved from http://labfon.letras.ulisboa.pt/texts/Franco\_2016\_BMC.pdf
Frota, S., Butler, J., Lu, S., & Vigário, M. (2016). Infants perception of native and non-native pitch contrasts, in Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 8, May 31-June 3, Boston University. In .. USA. Retrieved from http://labfon.letras.ulisboa.pt/texts/Frotaetal\_2016a\_SP.pdf
Frota, S., Cruz, M., Castelo, J., Barros, N., Crespo-Sendra, V., & Vigário, M. (2016). Tune or Text? Tune-text accommodation strategies in Portuguese, in Proceedings of Speech Prosody 8, May 31-June 3, Boston University. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 8, May 31-June 3, Boston University, USA. Retrieved from http://www.iscaspeech.org/archive/SpeechProsody\_2016/pdfs/148.pdf
Lu, S., Correia, S., Jerónimo, R., Vigário, M., & Frota, S. (2016). Revisiting “Stress Deafness” in European Portuguese – An ERP Study. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 8, May 31-June 3, Boston University. USA. Retrieved from http://labfon.letras.ulisboa.pt/texts/Luetal\_2016\_SP.pdf
Rodrigues, C., Martins, F., & Brissos, F. (2016). Investigação interdisciplinar em fonética forense: estudo de caso de identidade e disfarce de voz. In Actas da II Conferência do Instituto Medicina Legal e Ciências Forenses, 29-30 de Setembro 2015, Coimbra (Vol. 2015, pp. 60-61).
Filipe, M., Frota, S., & Vicente, S. G. (2017). Executive Functioning in Children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Cognitive and Affective Aspects. In Proceedings of International Conference Cognitive Neuroscience of Executive Functions (Vol. 118). Padua, Italy. http://doi.org/10. 23737/CNEF2017
Filipe, M., Frota, S., & Vicente, S. G. (2017). The influence of executive function on prosodic performance. In Proceedings of International Conference Cognitive Neuroscience of Executive Functions (Vol. 96).
Rodrigues, C., & Martins, F. (2000). Espaço acústico das vogais acentuadas de Braga. In Actas do XV Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística (pp. 301-315). Faro: APL.
Cruz, M., Swerts, M., & Frota, S. (2019). Do visual cues to interrogativity vary between language modalities? Evidence from spoken Portuguese and Portuguese Sign Language . In AVSP 2019 – International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing (pp. 10-11). Melbourne, Australia.
Frota, S., Butler, J., Severino, C., Uysal, E., & Vigário, M. (2019). Infant perception of prosodic boundaries without the pause cue: an eye-tracking study. In In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain & Paul Warren (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne (pp. 3160-3164). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.