The purpose of this study was to investigate the exchange of disfluencies from function words to content words with age in Brazilian Portuguese speakers who do and do not stutter. Ninety stuttering individuals and 90 controls, native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, were divided into three age groups (children, adolescents and adults). The study…

Learning to read can pose a major challenge to students, and much of this challenge is due to the fact that written language is necessarily impoverished when compared to the rich, continuous speech signal. Prosodic elements of language are scarcely represented in written text, and while oral reading prosody has been addressed in the literature…

This review article evaluates the intersection of the content of two recent anthologies in second language (L2) phonology. One of the books lays out both the methodological context and theoretical underpinnings of the field, whereas the other volume reports 11 empirical studies on the L2 acquisition of several aspects of pronunciation by adult…

Focuses on the directionality observed in the processes of change and acquisition of the prepositions that replaced Latin cases in the speech of Rio de Janeiro and in the contact Portuguese spoken by Brazilian Indians in the region of Xingu. (Author/VWL)

Discusses a shift in the distribution of first person plural pronouns, as well as changes in the patterns of use of the corresponding verb inflections, in spoken Brazilian Portuguese across four generations of speakers from Rio de Janeiro. (Author/VWL)

In this study the author uses the techniques of modern descriptive linguistics to analyze various features of the Portuguese verb system. The analysis is based on the colloquial, spontaneous speech of educated natives of Rio de Janeiro and is divided into four chapters: Phonology (pp. 6-29), Morphophonemics (pp. 30-49), Morphology (pp. 50-86), and…

Describes some of the current research on Brazilian Portuguese phonology. Various techniques are discussed that analysts utilize to investigate Brazilian Portuguese nasality. (49 references) (CB)

Examines the Brazilian Portuguese use of verb tenses in oral narrative episodes as a device to mark certain utterances that have a cohesive function in relating the episode to the overall purpose of the narrative, facilitating the listener's interpretation of the discourse in a global fashion. (CB)

Tests a model of second-language phonological acquisition that proposes a hierarchical relationship between language-specific transfer processes and universal development processes in terms of chronology and style. This was accomplished through an investigation of the consonant cluster production of four Brazilian learners of English. Claims of…

Six working papers in linguistics are presented. "The Semantics and Morphology of Mixtec Mood and Aspect" (J. Albert Bickford and Stephen A. Marlett) presents a relatively detailed description of the following grammatical categories in three Mixtec languages: Santiago Nuyoo, Santo Domingo Nuxaa, and Municipio of Tezoatlan.…

An analysis of Brazilian learners' errors in English word stress revealed a difficulty hierarchy of stress pattern rules and six stress prediction strategies: (1) cognate stress patterns; (2) predominant stress patterns of English; (3) initial vowels and consonants; (4) verbs with a tense vowel in the final syllable; (5) tertiary stress; and (6)…

A study analyzed four major classes of discourse marker in Brazilian Portuguese: "ne" and other requests for feedback; "ai," a sequential connector; "ah, bom," and other turn initiators; and "assim," a marker of explanation. Distribution in various discourse functions and sociodemographic conditioning, and…

A study investigated the extent to which native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) of Portuguese understand implicatures in Brazilian television commercials in Portuguese. Subjects were nine Brazilian graduate students and 11 American students of Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. Correct inference of the…