Oral Vowel Reduction in Brazilian Portuguese

Perception and Acoustics of Vowel Nasality in Brazilian Portuguese

This study explores the relationship between identification, degree of nasality and vowel quality in oral, nasal and nasalized vowels in Brazilian Portuguese. Despite common belief that the language possesses contrastive nasal vowels, literature examination shows that nasal vowels may be followed by a nasal resonance, while nasalized vowels must be followed by a nasal consonant. It is argued th...

Nasal Coda and Vowel Nasality in Brazilian Portuguese

Despite different theoretical perspectives and methodologies, nasal vowels in Brazilian Portuguese are characterized by their variability. Such variability can be understood in terms of vowel height related to velum movement (Clumeck, 1976; Cagliari, 1977) or in terms of segmental right context (Almeida, 1976; Cagliari, 1977; Shosted, 2006; Lovatto, 2008; Medeiros et al., 2008). Brazilian Portu...

The aerodynamics of vowel nasality and nasalization in Brazilian Portuguese

Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is thought to possess contrastive nasal vowels that are different from contextually nasalized vowels in its phonological system. Aerodynamic data (nasal and oral airflow) of 11 native speakers show that interspeaker variability is important in this language with regard to the nasal airflow ratio of tautosyllabic nasal vowels (TNVs; campo [kɐ̃ pʊ] ‘field’) and heterosyll...

Progressive Vowel Nasalization in Brazilian Portuguese: A Preliminary Analysis

Learning Sentence Reduction Rules for Brazilian Portuguese

We present in this paper a method for sentence reduction with summarization purposes. The task is modeled as a machine learning problem, relying on shallow and linguistic features, in order to automatically learn symbolic patterns/rules that produce good sentence reductions. We evaluate our results with Brazilian Portuguese texts and show that we achieve high accuracy and produce better results...