Sonia Frota

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• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Lisbon

This study aimed to develop and validate the screening versions of the European Portuguese MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories Short Forms (EP CDI-SFs), intended to guide referrals for comprehensive language assessments in infants and toddlers. The first cohort, aged 8-18 months, included 1,293 typically developing children (M age...

This study aimed to develop and validate the screening versions of the European Portuguese MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories Short Forms (EP CDI-SFs), intended to guide referrals for comprehensive language assessments in infants and toddlers. The first cohort, aged 8–18 months, included 1,293 typically developing children (Mage...

Despite progress in understanding the link between executive functions (EFs) (i.e., a set of skills involved in goal-directed activities crucial for regulating thoughts and actions) and word decoding skills, research has not yet determined the dynamics and extent of this link. This longitudinal study examined whether EF subcomponents (inhibition, w...

Head and eyebrow movements have been reported as question markers in both spoken (e.g. Swerts & Krahmer, 2004) and sign languages (e.g., Zeshan, 2004). However, the relative weight of these visual cues in conveying prosodic meaning remains unexplored. This study examines, through a kinematic analysis, if (and how) the amplitude of head falling move...

Aim: We aimed to explore whether there is an association between maternal perceived infant discomfort due to suggestive gastrointestinal alterations and oral-health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) through a survey. Materials and Methods: The present study included two main phases involving Portuguese-speaking parents with full-term infants aged 2–...

European Portuguese (EP) is a language with unpredictable stress. Previous behavioral studies have shown that without vowel reduction EP adult speakers displayed a stress deafness effect akin to that observed in speakers of fixed-stress languages, suggesting that vowel quality may be the primary cue for stress discrimination in EP. However, an even...

Prosody is known to scaffold the learning of language, and thus understanding prosodic development is vital for language acquisition. The present study explored the unfolding prosody model of prosodic development (proposed in Frota's et al. study in 2016) beyond early production data, to examine whether it predicted the development of early segment...

The early assessment of language and communication abilities is critical to meet the needs and challenges of inclusive societies. We developed a novel e-health approach whereby well-known assessment tools are available through online applications that allow a quick (computer, tablet, smartphone) on-screen assessment, making health monitoring and in...

Background: There is growing evidence that COVID-19 brought changes that immediately affected early language development. Little is known for how long these COVID-19 related changes shaped development. The current study systematically and longitudinally addressed this issue, following up children's language development throughout the first 2.5 year...

This chapter offers an analysis of the intonation system of European Portuguese (EP), developed within the Autosegmental-Metrical theory of intonational phonology. The empirical basis for the analysis consists mostly of data collected from the Interactive Atlas of the Prosody of Portuguese (InAPoP) project, combining different types of tasks and sp...

Kriol is the main language spoken in Guinea-Bissau, a multilingual country where the only official language is Portuguese. This study is a first description of the intonation of Kriol, focusing on the intonational contour of statements and lists, using the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. Although there has been an increasing interest in the proso...

Sensorimotor influences on infant auditory speech perception have been shown to modulate phoneme discrimination, highlighting the integration of sensorimotor information and auditory speech prior to production. Although the perception of prosody is multimodal, sensorimotor influences on prosody perception have not been investigated. We examined the...

Purpose Cross-language studies suggest more similarities than differences in how dysarthria affects the speech of people with Parkinson's disease (PwPD) who speak different languages. In this study, we aimed to identify the relative contribution of acoustic variables to distinguish PwPD from controls who spoke varieties of two Romance languages, Fr...

Serious games represent a promising avenue for intervention with children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, a neurodevelopmental disorder marked by persistent challenges in social communication and the presence of restricted, repetitive behaviors. Despite this potential, comprehensive reviews on this subject are scarce. This systematic revie...

Neste capítulo apresenta-se o estado da arte dos estudos em aquisição da prosódia no Português, considerando as variedades fonológica e prosodicamente contrastantes do Português Europeu (PE) e Português Brasileiro (PB). Partindo de uma visão sumária das características prosódicas das duas variedades, apresenta-se evidência empírica da aquisição do...

Introduction Although it could be expected that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted preschool children’s abilities associated with later reading skills, research has not yet addressed the topic. Our study focused on the impact of the pandemic on phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) abilities that have been shown to reliably pre...

Background As delays or disorders in early language and communication are the most prevalent symptom in children with disabilities, early screening is crucial to promote prevention, early diagnosis, and intervention. However, to the best of our knowledge, no screening tool is available for the joint assessment of early language and social communic...

This study describes the development and validation of Proso-Quest, a parental report of toddlers' prosodic skills that aims to assess early prosodic development in European Portuguese. The development and validation of Proso-Quest proceeded in three phases. Phase 1 was undertaken (a) to establish the structure of the parental report and select the...

Gestures have been shown to be temporally linked to prosody, as strokes are synchronous to prominent syllables and pitch accents. However, their precise temporal coordination is still under debate. Exploring kinematics using a 2D motion analysis software, we inspected the temporal interaction between head, eyebrows and prosody in statements and yes...

European Portuguese (EP) is a language with variable stress, a mixed prosodic profile and conflicting frequency distributions of trochaic and iambic stress patterns. Besides, duration and vowel quality, instead of pitch, have been claimed as the primary cues for stress perception in EP. Previous ERP and behavioral studies have revealed diverging re...

Language includes both auditory and visual cues relevant to language learning. Human communication and interaction rely on the acoustic speech stream produced as well as on language related visual information, most prominently the hands and the mouth and eye regions in the face. Infants and toddlers have been shown to integrate different sensory pe...

The development of language is critical to meet the demands and challenges of contemporary societies.Although many children diagnosed with neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism and intellectual disability display language impairments, the specific profile of impairments may differ across disorders, making research investigating language acro...

The development of language skills requires a range of linguistic abilities and cognitive processes, such as executive functions (EFs, i.e., a set of skills involved in goal-directed activities which are crucial for regulating thoughts and actions). Despite progress in understanding the link between language and EFs, the need for more research on t...

Este capítulo é dedicado ao desenvolvimento prosódico e à avaliação e intervenção prosódicas em contexto clínico. Partindo da caracterização do desenvolvimento prosódico típico, a par do papel da prosódia no processo de aquisição da língua, descrevem-se formas de prosódia atípica em diferentes populações clínicas. De seguida, apresenta-se uma revis...

In Guinea-Bissau, Portuguese is the only official language, and, for historical and sociopolitical reasons, European Portuguese (EP) is assumed as the variety spoken. However, we find a multilingual space in which Kriol is the national unity language and Portuguese is spoken as a second language. In this context, we analyzed the intonation of neutr...

As children with Down syndrome (DS) typically manifest significant delays in language development, the research has pointed out the predictors of later language skills for this clinical population. The purpose of this study was to systematically explore the evidence for early predictors of language outcomes in infants and toddlers with DS from stud...

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...

This volume focuses on research on prosodic variation, comprising intonation, prosodic phrasing, and segmental phenomena that are prosodically motivated or constrained, in several languages and language varieties. Besides Portuguese (European, Brazilian, and African varieties), the book covers another three unrelated languages and their varieties:...

An early sensitivity to prosody is well-documented in the language development literature and has been suggested to facilitate language learning. However, prosodic development and its relation to other areas of language development has been less studied. Some studies suggested that early prosodic development and early lexical development are relate...

The speech signal has been shown to contain a fine structure that consists of the fast changing spectral content (e.g., formant transitions, voicing, spectral energy distributions), together with amplitude modulations of the envelope with different timescales. These different modulation frequencies have been associated with linguistic units of diff...

Language includes auditory and visual cues relevant to language learning, and infants have been shown to take advantage of those cues while processing speech. With COVID-19 the use of face masks became pervasive, affecting the auditory and visual cues available to the listener, especially the young language learner. This study examined how acoustic...

Resumo: A Guiné-Bissau é um país multiétnico e multilíngue em que o português é a língua oficial, embora não seja língua materna. Estudos desenvolvidos com base na Fonologia Prosódica e na Fonologia Entoacional sobre o português falado na Guiné-Bissau (PGB) apontam que, quanto à densidade tonal, ele afasta-se da variedade lisboeta (SEP) e aproxima-...

The phonology of prosody has received little attention in studies of motor speech disorders. The present study investigates the phonology of intonation (nuclear contours) and speech chunking (prosodic phrasing) in Parkinson’s disease (PD) as a function of medication intake and duration of the disease. Following methods of the prosodic and intonatio...

Different methodologies applied in human and non‐human primate studies limit the comparisons that can be made. The early communicative gestures of 10 children between 7 and 12 months were analysed using a descriptive approach usually found in non‐human primate studies. Silent‐visual gestures were the most used, followed by contact and audible gestu...

Communicative abilities in infants with Down syndrome (DS) are delayed in comparison to typically developing (TD) infants, possibly affecting language development in DS. Little is known about what abilities might underlie poor communication and language skills in DS, such as visual attention and audiovisual speech processing. This study compares DS...

The prosodic systems of Basque, Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish have recently yielded a great deal of detailed work that has contributed to comprehensive descriptions of the different languages and language varieties. Taking a comparative stance, as in Frota and Prieto (2015b) for three Romance languages and Elordieta and Hualde (2014) for Basque,...

The ability to perceive lexical stress patterns has been shown to develop in language-specific ways. However, previous studies have examined this ability in languages that are either clearly stress-based (favoring the development of a preference for trochaic stress, like English and German) or syllable-based (favoring the development of no stress p...

The ability to extract word-forms from continuous speech plays a crucial role in language acquisition, particularly for vocabulary development (Singh et al., 2012; Kidd et al., 2018; Hoareau et al., 2019). This ability is known to develop differently across languages (e.g., Mersad et al, 2010), and to be modulated by prosodic structure: namely, wor...

Attention to talking faces plays an important role in early language and social communication development (Ayneto & Sebastián-Gallés, 2016; Fort et al., 2017; Pejovic, 2019). Specifically, the attentional shift from the eyes to the mouth by 8months of age has been linked to language development (Lewkowicz & Hansen-Tift, 2012). It has been suggested...

The ability to extract word-forms from continuous speech plays a crucial role in language acquisition, particularly for vocabulary development. This ability develops differently across languages, and was recently shown to be modulated by prosody: words at prosodic edges are segmented earlier than in utterance-medial position. Studies on word segmen...

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...

Children with deficits in executive functions (EFs) and impairments in pragmatic language have a range of cognitive and language difficulties that affect their literacy and educational achievements. As deficits in EFs and pragmatic impairments are characteristics of autism spectrum disorders, this study examined the associations between EFs and pra...

In this exploratory work we investigate the potential of sound-and frequency-based measures to differentiate the writings from two Portuguese authors, Camilo de Castelo Branco and Eça de Queirós. A systematic comparison was made between a sample of 30 excerpts from Amor de Perdição (total ca. 43,000 words) and a similar sample from Os Maias. Other...

Contrasts such as rising versus falling intonation contours play an important role in language development as they may signal a difference in illocution type. In languages such as Portuguese and Basque, intonation is the sole means to differentiate polar questions from statements, while languages such as English or German additionally use morpho-sy...

Languages exhibit various strategies to deal with tune-text conflicts, arising when voiced segments are insufficient for the realization of complex tones. In languages with consistent prosodic or metrical anchors for tones, it has been observed that selected strategies tend to be either tune preservation strategies (TPS) or segment preservation str...

Prosodic boundaries play a crucial role in signaling speech chunking, and may thus facilitate language learning. Previous studies have shown that infants are sensitive to prosodic boundaries and use them to segment speech. As prosodic boundary cues vary across languages, infants' sensitivity to prosodic boundaries may also vary. The present study e...

In spoken European Portuguese (EP), eyebrow raising has been considered to be a question marker, as it is the dominant visual cue for questions across regional variants. In Portuguese Sign Language (LGP), it is known that questions are conveyed by a specific facial (and bodily) expression, and that non-verbal correlates for intonation are conveyed...

Two outstanding questions in spoken-language comprehension concern (1) the interplay of phonological grammar (legal vs. illegal sound sequences), phonotactic frequency (high- vs. low-frequency sound sequences) and lexicality (words vs. other sound sequences) in a meaningful context, and (2) how the properties of phonological sequences determine the...

This paper studies the perception of information-seeking yes-no question intonation across varieties of Brazilian Portuguese spoken along the Atlantic Coast, namely Paraíba (North), Minas Gerais (Center) and Rio Grande do Sul (South). The hypothesis that the distinctions found in production studies, leading to major dialectal areas, are reflected i...

European Portuguese (EP) is a language with variable stress, and the main cues for stress are duration and vowel reduction. A previous behavioral study has reported a stress “deafness” effect in EP when vowel quality cues are unavailable. The present study recorded both event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral data to examine the stress proce...

The effects of medication and disease duration on the prosody of sentence modality and speech chunking in PD patients have been examined. It was found that the two prosodic functions are affected in different ways.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by a neurodegenerative chronic disorder with a motor symptomatology presence (WHO 2006). ü This disease affects 1%-2% world's population (60+ y.o.) and is classically characterized by a symptomatic triad that includes rest tremor, akinesia and hypertonia. Although the motor expression of the symptoms involv...

This chapter focuses on early development of intonation. Together with a precocious sensitivity to prosody documented in the literature, recent research has shown that infants’ early perception of pitch-based categories is already language-specific by 4–5 months, and that their discrimination abilities differ not only according to ambient language...

Word segmentation plays a crucial role in language acquisition, particularly for word learning and syntax development, and possibly predicts later language abilities. Previous studies have suggested that this ability develops differently across languages, possibly affected by the languages' rhythmic properties (Rhythmic Segmentation Hypothesis) and...

The syntax-phonology interface refers to the way syntax and phonology are interconnected. Although syntax and phonology constitute different language domains, it seems undisputed that they relate to each other in nontrivial ways. There are different theories about the syntax-phonology interface. They differ in how far each domain is seen as relevan...

Little is known about the relationship between prosodic abilities and executive function skills. As deficits in executive functions (EFs) and prosodic impairments are characteristics of autism, we examined how EFs are related to prosodic performance in children with high-functioning autism (HFA). Fifteen children with HFA (M = 7.4 years; SD = 1.12)...

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) refer to a complex group of neuro- developmental disorders causing difficulties with communication and interpersonal relationships, as well as restricted and repetitive beha- viours and interests. As early identification, diagnosis, and interven- tion provide better long-term outcomes, early markers of ASD have gaine...

This is the Portuguese version of the CSBS DP Checklist, a parental report that measures different language predictors. The checklist is used as a developmental screening tool for children between 6 to 24 months of age. One of the main goals is the early identification of children at risk for language and communication impairment. The Portuguese ve...

É crescente a valorização da conversão do conhecimento fundamental desenvolvido pelos cientistas em produtos concretos, socialmente relevantes. No Laboratório de Fonética da Universidade de Lisboa tem-se trabalhado nos últimos anos tanto em domínios de investigação fundamental, como de investigação aplicada. Neste artigo é feita uma revisão dos pri...

In the present paper we explore a methodology to map prosodic variation in Portuguese, namely intonation and rhythm, which goes beyond the traditional approaches used to represent segmental, lexical or syntactic variation. To find the most adequate mapping method for intonation and rhythm, we tested spatial interaction models for the representation...

Few studies explore the relation between the performance on prosodic tests and executive function skills. Our goal is to understand how executive functions are related to prosodic performance in a clinic population. As executive impairments and prosodic deficits are characteristic of autism, we analysed a group of 15 children (12 boys) with high-fu...

Durante muito tempo, a pesquisa em aquisição da linguagem concentrou-se no estudo da compreensão e da produção de enunciados pela criança. Porém, quando a criança começa a responder ao adulto ou a outra criança, seja através de gestos ou da fala, demonstrando que entendeu o que foi dito, ela já sabe muito sobre a língua da sua comunidade. Por volta...

In European Portuguese, the domain for sandhi phenomena is the intonational phrase. Unlike the intonational phrase, the phonological phrase has been shown to be only relevant for rhythm and prominence-related phenomena (Frota, 2000, 2014). Fricative voicing between words (casa[b]rancas, casa[p]retas) and ressylabification before vowel-initial words...

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, namel...

This short measure is a screening test for Autism Spectrum Disorder in early childhood.

The present research examines the rhythmic properties of European Portuguese spoken by native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Based on the rhythm metrics and corpora used in previous studies focused on the comparison across different languages and varieties (Ramus, Nespor & Mehler, 1999; Frota & Vigário, 2001), we aimed at determining the rhythmic pr...

Scientific knowledge transfer into society in the form of concrete products is increasingly valued. At the Lisbon Phonetics Lab work has been done for the past years in both basic and applied research. In this paper we survey recent major resources and applications made available by this Lab in areas related to phonological and lexical frequency in...

The validity of the European Portuguese CDI Short Forms (EP-CDI SF) in identifying language-impaired children (LI) and children at-risk for language impairment (AR) by comparison to typical development (TD), referring to the EP norms, was investigated. Language deficits are pervasive in Down Syndrome, and younger siblings of children with ASD or SL...

https://revistadescubraasdiferencasmaio2017.wordpress.com/2017/05/01/horizonte-21-novas-linhas-de-investigacao-em-trissomia-21/

The FrePOP (Frequency of Phonological Objects in Portuguese) database is a database of frequency information of phonological objects in different types of corpora, which may be used as reference information. Frequency values for different regions (including the varieties of Portuguese spoken in Brazil and in Africa) and for specific groups of popul...

FreP is a tool for the automatic computation of frequency information of phonological objects in the Portuguese language.

We describe the European Portuguese version of a test of prosodic abilities originally developed for English: the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (Peppé & McCann, 2003). Using this test, we examined the development of several components of European Portuguese prosody between 5 and 20 years of age (N = 131). Results showed pros...

In this article we examine three different hiatus resolution phenomena (Vowel Merger, Semivocalization and Back Vowel deletion) in five different urban regions in the north, centre and south of Portugal. These five regions show similarities with the Standard variety of European Portuguese: specifically lexical stress blocks Vowel Merger, whereas Se...

Individuals 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, three major challenges include: (1) dysarthria, consisting of orofacial motor dysfunction and dysprosody, which is linked to the...

Introduction Individuals 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 link...

Like consonants and vowels, infants’ ability to discriminate lexical pitch becomes language-specific with age (Mattock & Burnham, 2006). We know less about when infants perceive pitch marking of prosodic units. We tested English-learning infants on Portuguese bisyllabic stimuli where statements and yes/no questions are segmentally identical but dis...

In this paper we present a phonological analysis of the nuclear contour of declarative and interrogative utterances in Brazilian Portuguese, as spoken in 7 regions, along the Atlantic Coast - Paraíba, Sergipe, Bahia (North); Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro (Center), Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul (South). Declaratives present a falling contour,...

In this article we examine three different hiatus resolution phenomena (Vowel Merger, Semivocalization and Back Vowel deletion) in five different urban regions in the north, centre and south of Portugal. These five regions show similarities with the Standard variety of European Portuguese: specifically lexical stress blocks Vowel Merger, whereas Se...

This study explores the role of intonation and visual cues in the perception of sentence types in two European Portuguese varieties (SEP – standard, and PtD – Azores), previously shown to convey sentence type contrasts by using different intonational means and/or with facial gestures (Cruz, Swerts & Frota 2015). Forty native speakers from SEP and P...

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Establishing sentence modality and chunking the speech stream into units are two of prosody’s main functions. Both functions affect phrase-level meanings, playing a crucial role in communication. Portuguese uses contrasting nuclear contours to express modality, and intonational breaks for chunking (Frota, 2014). This study examines the impact of Pa...

This study investigated the CPS in IPB perception in European Portuguese, a language where pitch movements combined with boundary lengthening are mostly confined to IP-edges, namely the IP-final stressed syllable and the boundary syllable. Delexicalized sentences were used to address the debate of whether the CPS is, or not, purely prosody-driven.

Intonation is the phonologically structured variation in phonetic features, primarily pitch, to express phrase-level meanings. As in other speech sound domains, analyzing intonation involves mapping continuously variable physical parameters to categories. The categories of intonation are organized in a set of relations and rule-governed distributio...

This paper describes the European Portuguese MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories short forms, the first published instruments for the assessment of language development in EP-learning infants and toddlers. Normative data from the EP population are presented, focusing on developmental trends for vocabulary learning, production of m...

Several behavioral studies have suggested that speakers of languages with variable stress (e.g., Spanish) are better than speakers of languages with fixed stress (e.g., French) at discriminating stress contrasts. European Portuguese (EP) is a language with variable stress, and the main cues for stress are duration and vowel reduction. However, when...