This chapter describes the nuclear contours and intonational phrasing patterns of the most common sentence types across varieties of Portuguese. The resulting prosodic analysis is the first contribution to a Portuguese_ToBI proposal that offers a comparative description of four Brazilian Portuguese varieties—Baiano, Mineiro, and the Southeast and South areas of Sulista—and four European Portuguese varieties—Standard European Portuguese, Oporto, Alentejo, and Algarve—with the goal of providing a useful foundation for further systematic studies of Portuguese prosody. The analysis is based on data from the Interactive Atlas of the Prosody of Portuguese. Differences in the intonation of narrow-focus statements, commands, and requests, as well as in the distribution of pitch accents, were found to distinguish Brazilian and European Portuguese. The chapter concludes with an overview of the intonational system of Portuguese and its similarities and differences compared with other Romance languages.

Cruz, M., et al 2017 The role of intonation and visual cues in the perception of sentence types: Evidence from European Portuguese varieties. In this paper, we explore the role of intonation and visual cues in the perception of statements and questions in two varieties of European Portuguese-the standard (SEP) and the insular variety of Azores, Ponta Delgada (PtD)-previously shown to convey sentence type contrasts by different uses of intonational means and/or facial gestures, namely eyebrow movements. Forty native speakers (20 from each variety) were exposed to SEP and PtD stimuli in a perception task with three conditions (audio only, video only, and audiovisual). The audiovisual condition includes congruent and incongruent (both original and manipulated) stimuli, where there is either a match or a mismatch between the auditory and visual features as potential cues for a specific sentence type. We concluded that both SEP and PtD participants rely more on intonation than on eyebrow movement to identify sentence types, even when exposed to incongruent audiovisual stimuli. In the absence of audio information, unexpectedly, participants do not interpret eyebrow raising as a question marker, not even when perceiving stimuli from their native variety. When exposed to non-native audiovisual stimuli, both SEP and PtD participants present longer reaction times (RTs), especially for incongruent stimuli. Finally, although we confirm the strength of intonation over visual cues, RTs in the audiovisual condition are significantly shorter than in the audio condition, thus pointing to the relevance of visual cues for structural/linguistic marking.

IntroductionIndividuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) have to deal with several aspects of voice and speech decline and thus alteration of communication ability during the course of the disease. Among these communication impairments, 3 major challenges include: (1) dysarthria, consisting of orofacial motor dysfunction and dysprosody, which is linked to the neurodegenerative processes; (2) effects of the pharmacological treatment, which vary according to the disease stage; and (3) particular speech modifications that may be language-specific, that is, dependent on the language spoken by the patients. The main objective of the FraLusoPark project is to provide a thorough evaluation of changes in PD speech as a result of pharmacological treatment and disease duration in 2 different languages (French vs European Portuguese).Methods and analysisIndividuals with PD are enrolled in the study in France (N=60) and Portugal (N=60). Their global motor disability and orofacial motor functions is assessed with specific clinical rating scales, without (OFF) and with (ON) pharmacological treatment. 2 groups of 60 healthy age-matched volunteers provide the reference for between-group comparisons. Along with the clinical examinations, several speech tasks are recorded to obtain acoustic and perceptual measures. Patient-reported outcome measures are used to assess the psychosocial impact of dysarthria on quality of life.Ethics and disseminationThe study has been approved by the local responsible committees on human experimentation and is conducted in accordance with the ethical standards. A valuable large-scale database of speech recordings and metadata from patients with PD in France and Portugal will be constructed. Results will be disseminated in several articles in peer-reviewed journals and in conference presentations. Recommendations on how to assess speech and voice disorders in individuals with PD to monitor the progression and management of symptoms will be provided.Trial registration numberNCT02753192, Pre-results.

In Portuguese, different strategies for dealing with tune-text accommodation have been reported. However, no systematic research has been conducted exploring crucial cases of complex nuclear melodies realized in nuclear words with final stress, as in yes-no questions. Based on reading and semispontaneous data from ten regions in Brazil and eleven regions in Portugal, this study reveals that Brazilian and European Portuguese globally differ with respect to the strategies implemented: in Brazilian Portuguese, the text is preserved and the melody is changed (mostly by means of tonal truncation); in European Portuguese, the melody is preserved and the text is changed through various strategies, including schwa epenthesis. Faithfulness to the text or to the tune is thus a relevant dimension of variation both across and within languages, and text changes (through vowel lengthening, vowel split, vowel epenthesis, or blocking of vowel deletion) are crucial means to support tune realization that have recently been found in unrelated languages.

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Previous research has shown that eye gaze patterns relate to language development, with more attention to the mouth signaling ongoing acquisition. We examined infants' eye gaze in a stress perception experiment, in which European Portuguese (EP) learning infants showed a preference for the iambic stress pattern. Specifically, we asked whether there was a relation between eye gaze patterns and the preferred stress pattern. Eye gaze patterns of 25 monolingual typically developing infants aged 5-6 months old were examined using eye-tracking. Our results show that, although an interaction between looks to the area of interest (face, eyes, mouth, and arm) and stress preference was not found, eye gaze to the mouth region (and to the face) was modulated by the stress pattern, with more attention to the mouth in infants that do not show an iambic preference. These findings add further support for infants' use of eye gaze in early language development. They also highlight the need for multimodal approaches for a better understanding of language development. In the particular case of the challenging topic of the acquisition of stress in European Portuguese, they provide converging evidence for an advantage of iambic stress in early development. (195 words).

Infants have been shown to rely both on auditory and visual cues when processing speech. We investigated the impact of COVID-related changes, in particular of face masks, in early word segmentation abilities. Following up on our previous study demonstrating that, by 4 months, infants already segmented targets presented auditorily at utterance-edge position, and, using the same visual familiarization paradigm, 7–9-month-old infants performed an auditory and an audiovisual word segmentation experiment in two conditions: without and with an FFP2 face mask. Analysis of acoustic and visual cues showed changes in face-masked speech affecting the amount, weight, and location of cues. Utterance-edge position displayed more salient cues than utterance-medial position, but the cues were attenuated in face-masked speech. Results revealed no evidence for segmentation, not even at edge position, regardless of mask condition and auditory or visual speech presentation. However, in the audiovisual experiment, infants attended more to the screen during the test trials when familiarized with without mask speech. Also, the infants attended more to the mouth and less to the eyes in without mask than with mask. In addition, evidence for an advantage of the utterance-edge position in emerging segmentation abilities was found. Thus, audiovisual information provided some support to developing word segmentation. We compared 7–9-monthers segmentation ability observed in the Butler and Frota pre-COVID study with the current auditory without mask data. Mean looking time for edge was significantly higher than unfamiliar in the pre-COVID study only. Measures of cognitive and language development obtained with the CSBS scales showed that the infants of the current study scored significantly lower than the same-age infants from the CSBS (pre-COVID) normative data. Our results suggest an overall effect of the pandemic on early segmentation abilities and language development, calling for longitudinal studies to determine how development proceeds.

Introduction: Programs aimed at modernizing thyroid care by pairing at-home sample collection methods with telehealth options may serve an important and emerging role in thyroid care. The primary objective of this analysis was to evaluate telehealth utilization, demographics, and clinical characteristics of a cohort of consumer initiated at-home lab thyroid test users who were also offered the option of follow-up telehealth consultations. Methods: This was a retrospective analysis of real-world data from a de-identified consumer database of home-collected, mail-in Thyroid Tests utilized from March to May 2021 (n=8,152). The mean age was 38.6 (range 18-85) years and 86.6% of individuals identified as female. Results: Seven percent of test takers fell into a thyroid dysfunction category (0.9% overt-hypothyroidism, 2.9% subclinical hypothyroidism, 0.1% overt-hypothyroidism, and 3.3% subclinical-hyperthyroidism). Twelve percent of the overall sample opted into a telehealth consultation, with 91.8% receiving a non-treatment telehealth consultation and 8.2% receiving a treatment telemedicine consultation. Sixteen percent of individuals with overt or subclinical thyroid dysfunction engaged in telehealth consultations. Of those opting into a treatment consultation, 59.3% reported a history of thyroid issues, 55.6% indicated wanting to discuss their current thyroid medication, and 48% received a prescription medication. Discussion: The combination of at-home sample collection and telehealth is an innovative model for screening for thyroid disorders, monitoring thyroid function, and increasing access to care that can be implemented at a large scale and across a wide range of age groups.