EP-Plurals
EP-Plurals © 2014 by Ana Margarida Ramalho & Maria João Freitas is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
The EP-Plurals tool was designed to assess the acquisition of European Portuguese regular and irregular plural forms in nouns and adjectives. It currently includes (the asymmetry in number of items is due to child lexical restrictions):
- 8 items from the regular paradigm (4 words stressed in the penultimate syllable (coelho ‘rabbit’); 4 words stressed in the last syllable (café ‘coffee’))
- 8 items with word-final lateral (azul ‘blue’)
- 8 items with word-final diphthong (limão ‘lemon’)
- 3 items with word-final rhotic (flor ‘flower’)
- 3 items with word-final fricative (nariz ‘nose’)
- 3 items for invariant singular/plural forms (lápis ‘pencil’)
A preliminary experimental cross-sectional study was developed based on production data from 57 typically developing children from the Lisbon area, all EP monolinguals, aged 3;2 to 6;3). The data is available at PhonBank (https://talkbank.org/phon/access/).
The EP-Plurals project is coordinated by Ana Margarida Ramalho and Maria João Freitas, at Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa (CLUL); Jéssica Gomes and Mariana Castro are collaborators. The corpus was gathered in the context of Ana Margarida Ramalho’s PhD project (Ramalho 2017; http://rdpc.uevora.pt/handle/10174/23564). The research was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (individual PhD grant: SFRH/BD/88966/2012; CLUL funding: UID/214/2025). The tool used for data collection (EP-Plurals) is an appendix of the CLCP-EP (https://clul.ulisboa.pt/recurso/crosslinguistic-child-phonology-project-portugues-europeu), developed in the context of the Cross-Linguistic Child Phonology Project (University of British Columbia), coordinated by Barbara May Bernhardt and Joseph Stemberger.
References:
Gomes, J., Freitas, M. J., & Ramalho, A. M. (2025, April 4). Sobre o impacto da complexidade morfofonológica na aquisição: o caso do plural. Paper presented at the V Encontro de Linguística Aplicada, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.36413.93926
Gomes, J., Freitas, M. J., & Ramalho, A. M. (2025, May 28–30). Exploring the impact of morphophonological complexity in the acquisition of European Portuguese plural forms. Paper presented at the 46th International Child Phonology Conference, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20138.68800
Related references:
Afonso, Catarina & Maria João Freitas (2017). Os *caracoles são *azules? Dados espontâneos e experimentais sobre a aquisição dos plurais das palavras com lateral final. Linguística - Revista de Estudos Linguísticos da Universidade do Porto, 12, 73–97. https://ler.letras.up.pt/uploads/ficheiros/15935.pdf.
Freitas, M. João, Matilde Miguel & Isabel Faria (2001). Interaction between Prosody and morphosyntax: plurals within Codas in the acquisition of European Portuguese. In Barbara Höehle & Jurgen Weissenborn (org.s) Approaches to Bootstrapping. Phonological, Lexical, Syntactic and Neurological Aspects of Early Language Acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishers, volume 2. 45‒58. ISBN: 90-272-2492-7.
Ramalho, Ana Margarida (2010). Aquisição do Plural dos Nomes Terminados em Ditongo Nasal – Estudo com crianças entre os 3 e os 7 anos. Dissertação de Mestrado. Universidade de Évora.
Ramalho, Ana Margarida & Maria João Freitas (2012). Morphophonological complexity in the acquisition of EP: the case of nominal plural forms with final nasal diphthongs. Sandrine Ferré, Philippe Prévost, Laurie Tuller & Rasha Zebib (eds). Selected Proceedings of the Romance Turn IV Workshop on the Acquisition of Romance Languages. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 27‒52. ISBN: 978-1-4438-3498-8.
Zhou, Chao & Maria João Freitas (2024). Modelling the developmental path in the acquisition of /l/-final irregular plurals by Portuguese children. Language Acquisition. DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2024.2314029.
