This study presents new data about the cross-language application of the Late Closure principle (Frazier, 1978), whose universality was put in question by data from Spanish (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988). Using sentences containing a restrictive relative clause unambiguously modifying the first or the second noun of a complex NP (os cúmplices do ladrão/o cúmplice dos ladrões que fugiram), this study compares the behavior of Brazilian and European Portuguese speakers participating in a self-paced reading task. The data confirm that, in early phases of processing, attachment preferences are driven by a locality principle such as Late Closure. Based on a review of studies on Portuguese, Spanish and other Romance languages, we argue that the high-versus lowattachment difference across languages emerges cleanly only in off-line tasks, such as questionnaire studies, thus limiting the types of explanations for the cross-linguistic differences. We also advance an explanation for the high attachment preferences found in unspeeded questionnaire studies based on the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (Fodor, 1998a, 2002).

Neste artigo, apresentamos o funcionamento de um novo corpus de escrita e fala de crianças (Português LM) nos primeiros anos da escolaridade: a EFFE-On. O seu conteúdo está disponível online para pesquisas, dirigindo-se, principalmente, a professores, linguistas e terapeutas da fala. A EFFE-On foi desenvolvida no âmbito do projeto Escreves como Falas -Falas como Escreves? no Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa (CLUL). Entre outras aplicações, o corpus permite identificar formas ortográficas não-convencionais (FN-Cs); comparar ortografias não convencionais com as suas respetivas pronúncias; auxiliar o desenvolvimento e a adequação de materiais pedagógicos e terapêuticos; examinar aspetos fonológicos, morfológicos, sintáticos, discursivos, entre outros relativos ao texto produzido pela criança.

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For almost two decades, phonologists, phoneticians and psycholinguists have devoted attention to the value of prosodic information during silent reading. Until then information on the influence of syntactic and semantic aspects in silent reading was the focus of attention in Psycholinguistics. Despite the joint efforts of researchers, there are many issues to be explored regarding two main domains. The first relates to individual prosodic parameters to languages that can have influence on the processing of sentences. The second refers to how the parser uses the prosodic information present in written stimulus on the understanding of silently reading. In both situations, it will be necessary to focus on methodological aspects in addition to theoretical ones. If on the one hand we already have strong evidence about the influence of prosody in silent reading, on the other hand it cannot be denied that measuring the prosody mentally organized by the reader during reading process is not an easy task. Thus, this article intends to emphasize the complexity concerning the theme and at the same time the needs for further investigation in each language alone. It presents some insights from the early researches in Portuguese language and offers some suggestions for future investigation.

This study investigates the influence of lexical selection of adjectives on gender agreement in writing by late Chinese learners of European Portuguese (EP), with an online paradigm. Participants were asked to translate sentences (from Chinese to Portuguese) containing adjectives that ranged from easy to difficult, on a platform that recorded the writing process. A greater pause was observed in the difficult condition than in the easy condition at the critical position, i.e., just before the adjective. In addition, there were more errors in the difficult condition. These results suggest that when lexical selection is difficult it demands more resources from working memory (WM), and, hence, less resources are left for the agreement process, which results in more errors.

This paper focuses on intervention effects obtained by embedding a topic constituent (either a displaced topic or a clitic left-dislocated topic) within the domain of wh-movement. We present the results of two acceptability judgment tests carried out in European Portuguese (EP), which indicate that only a subset of the constructions in which a topic intervenes in the path of wh-movement is judged acceptable by native speakers. The pattern that emerges can be described by the following generalization: (1) A wh-movement dependency may contain a topicalized or clitic left-dislocated constituent in its scope iff the full topic-(cl)-gap dependency is contained within the path of wh-movement. This generalization indicates that a version of the no crossing constraint (e.g., Fodor 1978; Pesetsky 1982) holds in these configurations. We discuss the challenges faced by a purely syntactic account of (1) and suggest that a more promising line of an approach is one that attempts to derive (1) from processing constraints.

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Este artigo analisa dados longitudinais de escrita de vogais não acentuadas do português europeu, produzidos por crianças no 2º e 4º anos do Ensino Básico. Os dados foram extraídos do corpus EFFE-On, uma base de dados eletrónica de escrita e fala de crianças portuguesas nos anos iniciais de escolaridade. Os resultados mostram frequências distintas de formas ortográficas não convencionais para as vogais nas diversas posições da palavra, relacionadas com os processos de neutralização e de semivocalização. O desempenho observado na amostra é justificável, tendo em consideração o sistema fonológico e as suas manifestações fonéticas, em interligação com a grafia da língua e, ainda, com a prática docente.