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Background: The Perceived Physical Literacy Instrument (PPLI) has been the most adopted physical literacy instrument designed for adults to date, having been already translated to 5 languages. Still, despite its popularity, there is limited evidence of its psychometric properties. The aim of this study was to translate and adapt cross-culturally the PPLI to the Portuguese language and to analyze the psychometric properties of the Portuguese version in a sample of Portuguese-speaking adults. Methods: The study sample was composed of 434 participants (70% females) with a median age of 25 (18–39) years. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess psychometric properties of the scale. In addition, instrument assumptions between sexes through invariance testing were examined. Finally, concurrent validity, test–retest reliability, and test–retest agreement analyses were performed to gather additional evidence. Results: The results of the present study generally supported the measurement model. The 9-item, 3-factor model presented a good fit to the data and adequate construct validity (χ2 = 82.859 [24], P <.001, comparative-fit index =.948, Tucker–Lewis index =.922, standardized root mean square residual =.049, root mean square error of approximation =.075). In addition, the scale presented concurrent validity. Some issues arose with measurement invariance and overtime consistency. Conclusions: Considering the lack of validated instruments, we suggest a fair use of Portuguese version of PPLI to access physical literacy in adults. This study contributes to the validation of the PPLI by providing evidence of its psychometric properties in the Portuguese-speaking adult population and facilitates comparative analysis with previous and future studies utilizing the PPLI instrument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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One of the main challenges in the process of recognizing emotion through the voice are related to the specific characteristics of an individual's sound spectrum, such as accent and speech rhythm, as well as regionalism and wide variability of spoken phrases. Despite efforts to propose emotion recognition models, providing an increase in accuracy in classifying emotion in a specialized way is an open research question. Faced with these challenges, this work proposes DEEP (DEtection of voice Emotion in Portuguese language), an architecture for detecting voice emotion based on patterns present in the sound spectrum generated by the voice of Brazilian Portuguese speakers. DEEP recognizes each emotion by using a set of specialist Convolutional Neural Networks that receive as input the features extracted from the sound spectrum. With this, DEEP aims to specialize each emotion to increase the rate of correct answers and adapt to different tones and voice conditions that may occur in everyday life. Our results show that DEEP outperforms the emotion recognition measures of other state of art techniques for all evaluated scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Studies have demonstrated a morphological decomposition process in the initial stages of visual word recognition based on orthographically defined morphemes and independent of semantic and lexical information. The present study sought to investigate this phenomenon in adult Brazilian Portuguese-speaking readers. Method: Participants performed a lexical decision task preceded by primes at two Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA): 33 or 250 ms. The primes had one of the following relations with the target word: morphological (porteiro [DOORKEEPER]–PORTA [DOOR]), morpho-orthographic (cordeiro [LAMB]–CORDA [ROPE]), orthographic (abril [APRIL]–ABRIU [OPENED]), semantic (abelha [BEE]–MEL [HONEY]), or no relation (pessoa [PERSON]–DADO [DICE]). Results: Priming effects were observed for the morphological and semantic conditions at both SOAs but not for the orthographic and morpho-orthographic conditions. Conclusion: Our results suggest that semantic representations mediate morphological priming in Brazilian Portuguese since the early stages of visual word recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work addresses the gap in aspect extraction techniques for Portuguese by adapting methods originally designed for English. It focuses on TV devices and literary reviews in the TV and ReLi datasets. For this, models based on the BERT architecture were employed, including pre-trained general domain (BERTimbau) and specific domain models (BERTtv and BERTreli). Also, this paper contributes with a novel double embedding technique that merges these models. We further explored the potential of large language models (LLMs) with a Portuguese-trained LLaMa variant, Cabrita. Efficient fine-tuning techniques such as LoRA (low-rank adaptation) for BERTimbau and QLoRA (quantized low-rank adaptation) for Cabrita were applied to optimize resource demands. The BERTimbau model, adjusted with LoRA, achieved the highest F1 scores (0.846 for TV and 0.615 for ReLi), while Cabrita showed lower performance (0.68 for TV and 0.46 for ReLi). This study underscores the potential of adapting and optimizing existing techniques for aspect extraction in Portuguese, marking a significant advancement in the field [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is intended mainly to describe the state of affairs of the Portuguese language and its presence within the Portuguese community of Sydney (Australia). The main objective of our research is to observe how language is present in the landscape, observing practices and discourses within the associative life, the community school and the local ethnographic museum. This research project is part of a sociolinguistic study on language practices and representations of identity in multilingual contexts. Thanks to the ethnographic observations and description, it was also possible to analyse the fundamental role of Heritage Languages (HL) through ideologies and representations. Our analysis will help to provide more insight into how language and its representations are a manifestation of group belonging observing the associative life, the ethnographic museum and the community school which is facing the challenge of the decline in pupil numbers enrolled and the position of a HL in terms of prestige and power within contemporary global society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Objective Methods Results Conclusion The MDS‐UPDRS has been available in English since 2008, showing satisfactory clinimetric results and being proposed as the new official benchmark scale for Parkinson's disease (PD), being cited as a core instrument for PD in the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Common Data Elements program. For this reason, the MDS created guidelines for development of MDS‐UPDRS official, clinimetrically validated translations.This study presents the formal process used to obtain the officially approved Portuguese version of the MDS‐UPDRS.The study consisted of three phases: (1) Independent translation by Portuguese and Brazilian teams followed by a challenging consensus process that this article particularly emphasizes; (2) Cognitive pretest involving raters and patients from both Portugal and Brazil; (3) Validation test with a sample of 367 native Portuguese‐speaking PD patients.The overall factor structure of the Portuguese version was consistent with the English version based on a comparative fit index ≥0.96 for all four parts of the MDS‐UPDRS.This version can be designated as the official Portuguese version of the MDS‐UPDRS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 fixedstress languages, suggesting that vowel quality may be the primary cue for stress discrimination in EP. However, an event-related potentials (ERPs) study reported that EP adults were able to discriminate stress contrasts pre-attentively in the absence of vowel quality cues. These results seemed to indicate that EP adult speakers may attend to different cues in the attentive and pre-attentive stress perception. Moreover, both the behavioral and ERPs studies have revealed a processing advantage for iambic stress, which could not be predicted by the rhythmic properties of EP, the language-specific weighting of stress correlates, or the frequency distributions of trochaic and iambic stresses in EP. A recent eye-tracking study has found that EP-learning infants at 5-6 months already exhibited an iambic preference in the absence of vowel reduction, manifested by longer looking time at the iambic stress. The present study used a passive oddball paradigm to examine pre-attentive stress perception without vowel quality cues by 5-to-7-month-old EP-learning infants. Results from twentytwo participants showed that both the trochaic and iambic conditions yielded a positive discrimination response (p-MMR). In addition, the iambic condition elicited a prominent late discriminative negativity (LDN) as well as a P3a component. Our findings present the first evidence for reciprocal discrimination of stress patterns in EP-learning infants, showing that, as in adult speakers, stress processing might also differ at the pre-attentive and attentive stages in infants. Importantly, the stress perception ability in EP-learning infants seems to develop asymmetrically, with an advantage for the iambic stress pattern. The present study highlighted the role of language-specific factors that may affect developing stress perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing interest in written language has captured the attention of researchers engaged in the study of deafness, prompting a series of inquiries into the essential strategies and approaches to promote the development of reading and writing skills in deaf students. This article aims to analyze the results of teaching activities focused on Portuguese language centered on the academic abstract genre, developed for and with deaf students from the Libras Letters course at a public university in the northern interior of Rio Grande do Norte. The analyzed activities are part of the first phase of a didactic sequence (DOLZ, NOVERRAZ; SCHNEUWLY, 2004), linked to an ongoing doctoral research project. The results show that the activities carried out were successful, as they allowed students to express their thoughts in writing on the topic discussed, using sign language as a basis for their writing process. Through these activities, we were able to promote contact with written materials in the academic environment, encouraging reading and writing without suppressing Portuguese language in favor of Libras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Foco (Interdisciplinary Studies Journal) is the property of Revista Foco and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

To explain seemingly idiosyncratic restrictions on long passivization of causative/perception verbs in English and Brazilian Portuguese, we show that (a) long passives are blocked wherever the complement of a causative/perception verb constitutes a VoiceP/ProgP phase; (b) both TP complements and VP complements facilitate long passivization. To account for these patterns, we propose that A-movement can only cross a single phase head due to Chomsky's (2001) (second) Phase Impenetrability Condition and cannot use phase-edge escape hatches, but that T's EPP feature serves to feed A-movement into the matrix clause. In essence, successive-cyclic A-movement is possible only where embedded T is present to facilitate it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Romanische Bibliographie is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Background Objective Methods Results Conclusions The shift toward virtualized care introduces challenges in assessing the motor severity of Parkinson's disease (PD). The Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS‐UPDRS) part III, the most used rating scale in PD, lacks validation for synchronous remote administration.Our goal was to validate the usability of a patient guide to allow an accurate video‐based MDS‐UDPRS part III remote examination.We conducted a multi‐stage mixed methods study that included a team consensus for the concept of the guide, cognitive pretesting, and usability (system usability scale, [SUS]) testing in five sites (total n = 25 participants) with distinct linguistic and cultural contexts.A multi‐language (English, Portuguese, Spanish, and traditional Chinese) largely pictograph guide of the MDS‐UPDRS part III remote examination reached benchmark for usability (SUS score ≥68) in 25 participants who completed the synchronous remote assessment.The MDS‐UDPRS part III remote examination guide can be used remotely accurately, and facilitate clinical practice and research in a paradigm of telemedicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the perspective of linguistic landscape, this article reports on the use of Portuguese in the communities of Brazilians as return migrants in Japan, focusing on prohibition signs in public areas and signage in schoolscape to examine their relationship to social issues rooted in the cultural and ideological gap between Japanese locals and Brazilians of Japanese descent. Given the lack of detailed guidance from the national government, this study specifically investigates the process of employing Portuguese on signage. It reveals that Portuguese prohibition signs, ideologically charged, are typically installed by individuals or neighbourhood associations, not by the city government. Although the city government distributes templates for these signs upon request, those who install them are responsible for maintaining or removing them. Consequently, the maintenance process, influenced by the prevalent ideology in the host society, leads to these signs remaining in place. Regarding schoolscape, this study emphasises that the use of Portuguese on signage reflects cumulative efforts of teachers challenging the monolingual ideology in educational spaces. Considering various challenges facing immigrant children in educational settings, incorporating Portuguese not only has practical benefits but also significant potential to promote social acceptance of the immigrants and enhance their school life and learning experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies shows that 1%–2% of world population will develop chronic skin wound in their lifetime. Nowadays, the patient report outcome measure (PROM) questionnaires are used to evaluate the patient's quality of life. However, several PROM's questionnaires analyse specific chronic wounds. In this sense, WOUND‐Q toll was designed to evaluate all types of wounds. Because of the WOUND‐Q wide applicability, the use of WOUND‐Q is helpful for other countries. This study aimed to translate and adapt WOUND‐Q tool for Brazilian Portuguese language. Two independent translators translated the WOUND‐Q questionnaire from English to Brazilian Portuguese. Then these translators build Version 1 (T1) and version 2 (T2). In a consensus meeting, a third senior author defined the final version. In the back translation process, an English proficient translator translated the Brazilian Portuguese version to the original version. After another consensus, a final version was defined. Then, our group performed a cognitive test to validate this version. After the first translation, the comparison of version T1 and T2 achieved an intraclass correlation coefficient of 77%. The back translation showed the need of few adjustments. For the cognitive test, the mean age was 44.1 ± 9.3 years. Only one question was changed to improve comprehensiveness. In the review phase, few adjustments were performed to the final Brazilian Portuguese version, mostly regarding verbal tense and prepositions. In conclusion, this study successfully translated and adapted the WOUND‐Q questionnaire for a Brazilian Portuguese version. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing mostly on European Portuguese, this paper proposes that the internal syntax of Portuguese gerund clauses and the gradience in their degree of defectiveness may be explained by an interplay between their external syntax (locus of merge), agreement relations between embedded Tense and matrix Tense and the presence/absence of an intervening head. We first revisit the distinction between peripheral adverbial gerund clauses and central adverbial gerund clauses and show that their internal syntax correlates with their external syntax: central adverbial gerund clauses are merged in lower positions and appear to be more defective. We derive their defectiveness from the agree relation established between embedded T and matrix T. We then consider predicative gerund clauses and show that they are even more defective and restricted in their aspectual value, lacking a T head. Finally, we consider predicative gerund clauses introduced by como 'as' and show that, although they are merged in a low position, they are less defective than central adverbial gerund clauses. We attribute this mismatch between the internal and external syntax of this specific type of gerund clause to the presence of the Predicate head como, which intervenes between matrix T and embedded T and blocks the agreement relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article raises the hypothesis that 3rd person, accusative o/a ("him/her") and dative lhe ("to him"/ "to her") clitics, as well as the indefinite clitic se ("one"), contrary to 1st and 2nd person me/te ("me/you"), were never part of the grammar of the populations who acquired Portuguese as L2 in Brazil; rather, 3rd person clitic pronouns have been learned by a small number of Brazilians with school access (0.5 %), in the beginning of the 19th century. To bring support to this hypothesis, socio-historical information is presented, according to which, during about 350 years of colonization, slaved Africans and their descendants constituted the largest part of the population; their contact with several waves of Portuguese immigrant workers contributed to the emergence of Brazilian dialects differing in many aspects from European Portuguese (EP). Data from European and Brazilian Portuguese (PB) popular theater plays, written across the 19th and the 20th centuries, show that EP exhibits a robust and stable system of 3rd person accusative and dative clitics, contrary to BP. Analyses of recorded EP and BP since the 1970s attest the extremely rare use of such clitics in BP, very close to the percentages shown in the more recent plays, whereas formal writing reveals the school relative success in the effort to teach 3rd person clitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses null objects (NOs) in Ibero-Romance. European Portuguese (EP) has both definite and indefinte NOs, but Castillian Spanish (CSpanish) only allows NOs when the antecedent is a bare plural nominal or a mass noun. The paper argues that these differences are related to the distribution of bare nominals in each language and proposes that the same underlying mechanism is at the root of indefinite and definite object drop, namely a rootless [nPn ] proform. [nPn ] denotes a contextually salient property, its possible interpretations being derived by general type-shifting operations. In CSpanish, the property denoted by [nPn ] is interpreted as a restrictive modifier of the predicate and the relevant variable is bound under VP level Existential Closure. Focusing on EP, there are striking similarities between definite NOs and other types of nominal anaphora, including epithets. In particular, like epithets, NOs are subject to an Antilogophoricity Constraint. This affinity between NOs and epithets constitutes a case in favor of the idea that the NO is a base-generated nominal. The difference with respect to CSpanish lies in the possibility of interpreting the null nominal by a choice function, a function maps a property onto an entity that has the property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a new characterization of the Null Subject Parameter (NSP). I contend that the NSP must be modeled referring to two main properties of the Agree/agreement systems: (i) presence/absence of abstract Agree, and (ii) presence/absence of agreement dissociation at PF. The first property results in the division between radical argument ellipsis languages of the Japanese type and consistent null subject languages of the Spanish type, including languages like Central Trentino, i.e., languages with some obligatory clitic subjects but with rich agreement and free inversion. The second property results in the division between consistent null subject languages and consistent non-null subject ones. The agreement dissociation hypothesis also accounts for the partial null subject type, which characterizes languages like Brazilian Portuguese that have impoverished agreement expansion at PF (perhaps, only for number features). From a theoretical point of view, this study focuses on the agreement dissociation property showing why abstract Agree cannot guarantee subject ellipsis even in those perplexing cases in which it produces enough agreement distinctions at PF. The reason is that only an expanded agreement morpheme adjoined to the T0 node can serve as a licit antecedent for ellipsis of a subject D0 head at PF. Therefore, the theory derives the bimorphemic principle in Koeneman and Zeijlstra (Koeneman, Olaf & Hedde Zeijlstra. 2021. Pro-drop and the morphological structure of inflection. Ms. Available at: https://www.heddezeijlstra.org/bio) without further ado, i.e., the observation that null subject properties correlate with a bimorphemic T0 node expressing tense and agreement separately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Holmberg (Holmberg, Anders. 2005. Is there a little pro? Evidence from Finnish. Linguistic Inquiry 36(4). 533–564) and its revised version in Holmberg et al. (Holmberg, Anders, Aarti Nayudu & Michelle Sheehan. 2009. Three partial null-subject languages: A comparison of Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish, and Marathi. Studia Linguistica 63(1). 59–97) derive the availability of null subjects in a given language from the interaction between T with/without a D(efiniteness)-feature and the features of subject pronouns. Their theory predicts the existence of consistent null subject languages, whose T has the D-feature, and partial null subject languages, whose T lacks the D-feature. This paper examines this D-feature approach to null subjects against the empirical evidence provided by Brazilian Portuguese, a partial null subject language, and European Portuguese, a consistent null subject language, showing that it cannot account for the range of microvariation observed with respect to different null subject pronouns and the type of T (finite vs. participle vs. gerund). We argue that, in comparison, the ellipsis account of null subject licensing put forward in Martins and Nunes (Martins, Ana Maria & Jairo Nunes. 2021. Brazilian and European Portuguese and Holmberg's 2005 typology of null subject languages. In Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen & Luisa Meroni (eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2018. Selected papers from "Going Romance" 32, Utrecht, 171–190. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins) fares better. It retains from Holmberg (Holmberg, Anders. 2005. Is there a little pro? Evidence from Finnish. Linguistic Inquiry 36(4). 533–564 et seq.) the insight that the licensing of null subjects depends on the interaction between the features of T and the features of subject pronouns but resorts only to ϕ-features and Case. Crucially, it relies on the (theoretically and empirically) plausible assumption that the relation between abstract ϕ-features and verbal agreement morphology need not be transparent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Antimicrobial resistance is driven by inappropriate antimicrobial prescribing. The National Antimicrobial Prescribing Survey (NAPS) is an Australian-developed auditing platform to assist in the assessments of antimicrobial quality by antimicrobial stewardship programmes using consensus-based definitions. The NAPS has demonstrated to be transferable to other countries. Its adaptation to Portugal could improve knowledge about the quality of antimicrobial prescribing in the country. Objectives To translate, culturally adapt, and validate the Australian Hospital NAPS appropriateness assessment definitions of antimicrobial prescribing for Portugal. Methods International recommendations on translation and adaptation of instruments were followed. Two panels of experts participated in the process, using Zoom® for discussions and interviews, and Google Forms® for assessing vignettes. A native English-speaking person proficient in Portuguese conducted the back-translation. SPSS v.28 and Excel® were used for validity calculation. Results The Portuguese version was well accepted, its implementation being perceived as desirable and feasible by the experts. Validation process showed a Fleiss' κ score of 0.483 (95% CI, 0.415–0.551, P  < 0.005) for appropriateness, and an average agreement with the Australian NAPS team of 0.8 and 0.9, respectively, for appropriateness and reasons for inappropriateness. Conclusions The Portuguese version of the Australian Hospital NAPS appropriateness assessment definitions of antimicrobial prescribing, the first to be translated from English, was deemed non-inferior to the original, was well accepted, considered to be desirable and feasible, and could inspire other countries, particularly other Portuguese-speaking countries, to adapt and validate them in their own contexts, reinforcing the possibility of transferring NAPS use beyond Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article discusses the book "Dictionnaires et réseaux des lexicographes aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles," which focuses on dictionaries and lexicographers in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly Antoine Furetière's Dictionnaire universel. The book explores the international influence of French lexicography during this time period and the proto-encyclopedic nature of dictionaries from that era. It also examines the revisions made by Basnage de Beauval to Furetière's work and the competition it faced from the Dictionnaire de Trévoux. The book is divided into two sections, with the first section focusing on the Dictionnaire universel and its influence, and the second section discussing contemporary multilingual dictionaries in Europe. The article provides a summary of the contents of the book, including the changes made by Basnage and the influences between various dictionaries during this period. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural is the property of Sociedad Espanola para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Gênero e Interdisciplinaridade is the property of Instituto de Ensino e Pesquisa Periodicojs and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents the results of a research on toponyms of cities in the state of Tocantins, Brazil, in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). Signs were collected from observation and interviews with deaf people. The state of Tocantins consists of 139 municipalities and, so far, we have surveyed 61 toponyms. Signs were categorized into (1) native, (2) initialized and (3) fingerspelled (exclusive categories). Regarding motivation, toponyms categorized as iconic motivation, covering (1) material and (2) cultural and Portuguese language motivation, covering (3) calque and (4) writing. The spelling motivation is the most prevalent in the toponyms of the cities of Tocantins, also combining with other types of motivation, such as (5) material and spelling, (6) cultural and writing, and (7) calque and spelling. We bring further considerations on these categories and suggest forearm as a productive point of articulation for toponymic signs in the context of Tocantins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Angolan Government has introduced two significant educational reforms which, among other goals, sought to liberate the education system from the colonial epistemologies and Eurocentrism. Though allegedly progress has been made in some sectors such as building school infrastructure and reducing illiteracy, the same cannot be claimed with regard to the curriculum, and in turn the textbooks, which seem unaltered. This paper examines one potent source of cultural politics, namely Portuguese language teaching, that is a compulsory subject at primary schooling level. The article traces semiotic representations in four randomly selected primary schooling textbooks by focusing on anthroponomy, ethnicity/race and occupation, using the postcolonial theory as a theoretical framework. In terms of methodology, the paper makes use of qualitative content analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Foco (Interdisciplinary Studies Journal) is the property of Revista Foco and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Foco (Interdisciplinary Studies Journal) is the property of Revista Foco and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Portuguese intelligence apparatus under António de Oliveira Salazar's Estado Novo (New State) remains understudied. Even if there has been a relevant development of literature in general political terms after 25 April 1974, both in Portuguese and foreign languages, this interest seems to have decreased, even in the Portuguese sphere. This article aims at filling this gap in the literature. It provides an understanding of the historical context that enabled Salazar to develop Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado's political police role in the historical context of both multipolarity before 1945 and bipolarity after the end of World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media has revolutionized the manner in which our society is interconnected. While this extensive connectivity offers numerous benefits, it is also accompanied by significant drawbacks, particularly in terms of the proliferation of fake news and the vast dissemination of hate speech. Identifying offensive comments is a critical task for ensuring the safety of users, which is why industry and academia have been working on developing solutions to this problem. Prior research on hate speech detection has predominantly focused on the English language, with few studies devoted to other languages such as Portuguese. This paper introduces the Offensive Language Identification Dataset for Brazilian Portuguese (OLID-BR), a high-quality NLP dataset for offensive language detection, which we make publicly available. The dataset contains 6,354 (extendable to 13,538) comments labeled using a fine-grained three-layer annotation schema compatible with datasets in other languages, which allows the training of multilingual/cross-lingual models. The five NLP tasks available in OLID-BR allow the detection of offensive comments, the classification of the types of offenses such as racism, LGBTQphobia, sexism, xenophobia, and so on, the identification of the type and the target of offensive comments, and the extraction of toxic spans of offensive comments. All those tasks can enhance the capabilities of content moderation systems by providing deep contextual analysis or highlighting the spans that make a text toxic. We further experiment with and evaluate the dataset using state-of-the-art BERT-based and NER models, which demonstrates the usefulness of OLID-BR for the development of toxicity detection systems for Portuguese texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of identifying and classifying tokens in texts corresponding to a set of pre-defined categories, such as names of people, organizations and locations. Datasets labeled for this task are essential for training supervised machine learning models. Although there are many datasets labeled with texts for English, in the Portuguese language they are scarcer. This work contributes to the creation and evaluation of a manually labeled dataset for the NER task, with texts in Brazilian Portuguese, in the specific domain of the beverage called Cachaça. This is a popular drink in Brazil, and of great economic importance. This is the first NER dataset in the beverage domain, and can be useful for other types of beverages with similar entity categories, such as wine and beer. We describe the process of data collection, creation of the dataset and its experimental evaluation. As a result, we created a dataset containing over 180,000 tokens labeled in 17 entity categories. The labeling obtained an agreement coefficient of 0.857 among the labelers, according to the Fleiss' Kappa metric, which is considered almost perfect. In our experimental evaluation, we obtained a micro-F1 value equal to 0.933 in the test set. The size of the dataset, as well as the result of its experimental evaluation, are comparable to other datasets in the Portuguese language, even though ours has a greater number of entity categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Objectives: To better understand the impact of different oral conditions on children, several instruments are available to measure oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL). To adapt and validate cross-culturally the Child Oral Health Impact Profile—Short Form 19 (COHIP-SF19) questionnaire to the Portuguese language. Methods: The COHIP SF-19 was translated and back-translated, and tested for its reliability and for psychometric properties in children who were aged between 8 and 17 years old. The COHIP-19-PT was tested for its internal consistency, construct validity, content validity, and test–retest reliability. Results: The COHIP-19-PT revealed good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.88) and test–retest reliability (interclass correlation = 0.78). The CFA analysis confirmed the structure of COHIP-19-PT. The first-order model showed an adequate fit: GFI = 0.878; CFI = 0.812; RMSEA = 0.083 (90% CI: 0.077–0.090). No invariance was found for the gender-based groups. The correlation between the sub-scales was also assessed, confirming significant correlations between all subdomains. Conclusions: The COHIP-19-PT is a valid and reliable scale for measuring children's oral health-related quality of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we present the results of a process of adapting a research instrument developed to measure the level of basic astronomy knowledge among the Brazilian population. This instrument, called "Test of Levels of Knowledge in Astronomy" (TNCA), was developed in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and, therefore, was organized and disseminated in the form of an electronic form to the 57 students and teachers who participated in this research. The TNCA consists of the translation and adaptation of all 27 multiple-choice questions contained in the Test Of Astronomy Standards (TOAST), the result of over 20 years of research, developed, validated, and consolidated by the Center for Astronomy & Physics Education Research, a renowned research center in Astronomy Education in the United States. The changes made to the original items are due not only to the linguistic peculiarities of the Portuguese language but also to the specificity of the sky observed from the southern hemisphere of our planet and, particularly, the Brazilian geographical and educational context. The TNCA was made available and distributed digitally to three different groups composed of high school students, Physics undergraduates, and Physics teachers, and the research corpus was analyzed according to the Classical Test Theory. This analysis allowed us to compare the conceptions observed in our test with both the results of the original instrument and the results of research in Astronomy Education. Our results showed a strong compatibility between the validation indexes and indicators of the items obtained on TOAST and TNCA, with the identification of specific problems in only 4 of the 27 questions analyzed. Thus, after the analysis, we adapted the four questions identified with lower validation potential to consolidate the final version of the TNCA. This new version is presented as a promising instrument for future application on a statistically significant scale aiming at its validation as an assessment tool for basic Astronomy knowledge in physics and astronomy education contexts in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some studies in the literature on science education have pointed to ambiguities related to the concept of heat in university textbooks. This situation is one of the reasons why this physical concept is one of the most difficult to teach and is sometimes underestimated. In view of this problem, a particular set of conceptual ambiguities is presented here by analyzing 20 physics textbooks used by teachers of undergraduate courses, with the aim of examining the different constructs provided by the authors in terms of the linguistic issues they deal with when situating the concept of heat, both in terms of definition and symbolism, and in terms of conceptual application. The content analysis of the sample of books studied allows us to conclude that the difficulties are partly conceptual, partly linguistic, and often both, which constitutes a persistent educational barrier. The books selected are recent editions of many works in Portuguese - most of them translated from other languages - in which certain comparisons have been made, including with some older editions by the same authors, in order to highlight exemplary changes related to the scientific concept under consideration. Finally, there is a relevant contribution to previous studies in this line of investigation of textbooks, related to the semantics of the contents present in them, through a significant extension of the particularities discussed about the concept of heat in view of the expressive collection of books studied, whose reflections should subsidize the teaching actions on the subject Physics II in the curriculum of various undergraduate courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some recent studies have posed the hypothesis according to which the grammatical stage that precedes the cultured trend of Brazilian Portuguese is Colonial Brazilian Portuguese, not Classical Portuguese. Therefore, there are still few works systematically comparing these two varieties. This is the goal of the present paper, which focuses on word order. By undertaking a corpus-based study using the same textual genre from the contemporary authors Eusébio de Matos and António Vieira, we have looked for all word order patterns while paying special attention to the X*VS order (with one or more constituents preceding the verb and a postverbal subject), given that it is quite typical of Classical Portuguese as a V2-like grammar, unlike the modern Portuguese grammars. We have observed that, although the colonial text follows the general trends of the classical language, it starts to depart from a V2-like grammar because it shows a higher frequency of non-V2 orders and a preference for informationally marked constructions involving internal positions to the clause. From a parameter hierarchy viewpoint, the main conclusion is that such differences represent frequency divergences which are consistent with nano- or microparametric changes which took place later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between syllabic duration and F0 contours for implementing three prosodic functions. Work on rhythm usually describes the evolution of syllable-sized durations throughout utterances, rarely making reference to melodic events. On the other hand, work on intonation usually describes linear sequences of melodic events with indirect references to duration. Although some scholars have explored the relationship between these two parameters for particular functions, to our knowledge, there has been no investigation on the systematic correlation between syllabic duration and F0 values throughout narrative sequences. Based on a corpus of story retelling with nine speakers of Brazilian Portuguese from two regions, our work investigated the interplay between syllabic duration and melody to signal three prosodic functions: terminal and non-terminal boundary marking and prominence. The examination of local syllabic duration maxima and four F0 descriptors revealed that these maxima act as landmarks for particular F0 shapes: for non-terminal boundaries, the great majority of shapes were increasing and increasing–decreasing patterns; for terminal boundaries, almost all shapes were decreasing F0 patterns; and for prominence marking, the great majority of shapes were high tones across the stressed syllable. Time series analyses revealed significant correlations between duration and specific F0 descriptors, pointing to a ruled interplay between F0 and syllabic duration patterns in Brazilian Portuguese story retelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, the use of questionnaires has become one of the most used methods for analyzing individuals' experiences. Especially in the area of gameful environments (e.g., games, gamification, and simulators), the Gameful Experience Questionnaire, a self-report instrument to measure gameful experience, became one of the most popular. Despite the instrument's popularity, there is no Brazilian Portuguese version, preventing studies from being carried out in Brazil (i.e., a country with more than 200 million inhabitants), where only 5.1% of the population have adequate English comprehension skills. To face this challenge, we conducted a cross-cultural adaptation of the Gameful Experience Questionnaire, providing a version of the questionnaire in the Brazilian Portuguese language. For this process, we conducted a mixed-methods (i.e., qualitative and quantitative) psychometric study (N = 384) organized in six steps (i.e., (i) translation, (ii) synthesis, (iii) experts evaluation, (iv) target audience evaluation, (v) adapted instrument application, and (vi) validation (i.e., confirmatory factor analysis)). The results indicate that the cross-cultural adaptation took place efficiently, where the resulting instrument maintained the psychometric properties of the original, measuring the construct of interest with similar effectiveness (i.e., χ 2 / d f = 2.4, RMSEA = 0.061, CFI = 0.991, TLI = 0.989, GFI = 0.986 and SRMR = 0.061), enabling its application with Brazilian Portuguese speakers. With this study, we contribute to researchers and practitioners in the field of gameful environments by providing an instrument to measure gameful experience in the Brazilian Portuguese language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: We define cultural capital as a set of assets or resources accumulated over a lifetime through relationships and events in the family environment. We analyze cultural capital under two dimensions: static cultural capital (SCC) and relational cultural capital (RCC). The objective of this study was to verify the effect that cultural capital has on students' academic performance. Method: The research included the participation of 11,795 students who were classified into four levels of cultural capital, in each of the two dimensions: G1-Critical, G2-Low, G3-Medium, and G4-High. Statistical analyses such as ANOVA, Student's t-test and factorial design showed the impact of cultural capital in the combination of the different groups with the subjects of Portuguese and mathematics. Results: The results led us to conclude that: (1) cultural capital, in both dimensions, impacts the students' academic performance, both in Portuguese, F(3,11764) = 9.516, with p < 0.001 and ɳ² = 0.002, F(3,11764) = 42.349, with p < 0.001 and ɳ² = 0.011, and in mathematics, F(3,11764) = 13,728, with p < 0.001 and ɳ² = 0.003, and F(3,11764) = 28.138, with p < 0.001 and ɳ² = 0.007, and; 2. RCC linearly impacts student performance as SCC is increased, F(9,11771) = 1.869, with p = 0.052 and ɳ² = 0.001. Conclusion: (1) cultural capital impacts students' academic performance, but most notably in the Portuguese language discipline. (2) The dimensions of cultural capital behave differently and the excess of SCC, without the presence of RCC, impacts the reduction of medium performance. (3) The RCC linearly impacts student performance as the SCC is increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Foco (Interdisciplinary Studies Journal) is the property of Revista Foco and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) show a wide range of impairments, including poor pre-reading skills and decoding difficulties due to phonological deficits and such difficulties have significant repercussions on the acquisition of written language. However, evidence about reading processes and development is mainly available for English-speaking children with DLD, limiting our understanding of this process in a cross-linguistic manner. The orthographic characteristics of languages significantly influence the learning process of written code. Unlike English, Brazilian Portuguese has a transparent decoding system and its orthography presents a set of consistent, univocal grapheme-phoneme relations. The present study investigated whether the challenges reported in decoding for children with DLD in opaque languages hold for children with DLD who are speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and whether the length and type of stimuli influence the decoding skills of children with DLD differently than when compared to children with typical language development (TLD). Sixteen children with DLD between seven and ten years of age who are monolingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and 64 controls with TLD matched by gender, age, and socioeconomic status, with the children with DLD in a 4:1 ratio; participated in the study. All children performed a computerized task where they were asked to decode a linguistically balanced list of words and nonwords designed according to Brazilian Portuguese decoding rules. The present study provides substantial evidence that children with DLD who are speakers of Brazilian Portuguese have deficits in the acquisition of decoding and that the decoding profile of children with DLD is subject to multiple influences, not only with relation to the length and type of stimuli but also characteristics of the languages these children are being literate in, highlighting the multifactorial nature involved in the development of decoding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the product of the professional master's degree in Linguistics and Teaching at the Federal University of Paraíba. The objective of the proposal is to offer a training course for a decolonial approach to the study of the most useful oral and written textual genres for the Kanela/Memortunré people. It is the result of action research which aims to collaborate with the community participating in this study. To support this study and the training proposal, we used the framework of Antunes (2003), Bakthin (1997), Paulo Freire (2016), Kleiman (2005, 2006), Mignolo (2003, 2014), Nascimento (2012), Rojo (2004), schneuwly; Dolz (1999), Walsh (2009, 2010) among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a learner corpus-based study of English article use ("a"/"the"/Ø) by L2 learners with four typologically distinct first languages (L1s): German and Brazilian Portuguese (both have articles), Chinese and Russian (no articles). We investigate several semantic and morphosyntactic factors—for example, specificity, prenominal modification that can affect article use. Our analysis of 660 written scripts from the Education First Cambridge Open Database confirms the lower overall accuracy of learners with no-article L1s. Our main finding is the differential effect of specificity on definite and indefinite articles: learners tend to associate specificity with "a," which implies article omission with nonspecific indefinite singulars and overuse of "a" with specific indefinite mass nouns. Prenominal modifiers further contribute to perceived specificity, leading to article overuse with modified indefinite mass nouns. However, in definite contexts, prenominal modifiers are associated with increased article omission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Welfare Policies & Social Work Journal / Revista Internacional de Políticas de Bienestar y Trabajo Social is the property of Asociacion Internacional de Ciencias Sociales & Trabajo Social and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Anuario Electrónico de Estudios en Comunicación Social 'Disertaciones' is the property of Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Senora del Rosario and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper addresses the specificities of online hate speech against the Afro-descendant, Roma, and LGBTQ+ communities in Portugal. The research is based on the analysis of CO-HATE, a corpus composed of 20,590 YouTube comments, which were manually annotated following detailed guidelines created for that purpose. We applied methods from corpus linguistics to assess the prevalence of overt and covert hate speech, counter-speech, and offensive speech, considering different grounds of discrimination, and to investigate the main linguistic and rhetorical strategies underlying hatred messages. The research results highlight the importance of tackling covert hate speech, a recurring phenomenon often anchored in irony and fallacious argumentation, including the emotional appeal to fear and the implicit call to action. We believe this study will aid in advancing the analysis of online hate speech, while promoting the development of efficient automated detection models, specifically regarding the Portuguese language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a global problem with severe consequences for victims and their development, with various resulting consequences. Sentences regarding CSA crimes can be unconsciously influenced by extralegal factors. This study aimed to understand how Portuguese CSA victims are represented in judges' sentencing of offenders. Twenty-seven sentences of CSA, from a Portuguese database, were thoroughly analyzed through thematic analysis. Six main themes pertaining to the victim, emerged from the sentences' analysis: (i) emotional response during statements; (ii) reported details and reactions; (iii) credibility and reliability of statements; (iv) revelation and secret-keeping; (v) victim's trajectory; and (vi) impact on the victim. The assessment of the credibility of the victim's statements proved to be central across all sentences. Data related to external sources, namely judges' personal beliefs, physical evidence, and witnesses, emerged. Legal and psychosocial factors were identified, with the latter consisting of victim-blaming and legitimization of sexual violence. As for the practical implications of these findings, we argue that a fair exercise of justice, and improvement of the efficacy of prosecution of CSA is only possible through identification of these sensitive issues and adequate addressal of them during magistrates' training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]