FreP: An electronic tool for extracting frequency information of phonological units from Portuguese written text

Abstract

The importance of frequency for phonological phenomena has long been noticed in the literature. However, frequency information available for phonological units in Portuguese is scarce, non-replicable, corpus dependent, and hard to obtain due to the non-existence of a free tool for public use. This paper describes FreP, a new electronic tool that provides frequency counts of phonological units at the word-level and below from Portuguese written text: namely, major classes of segments, syllables and syllable types, phonological clitics, clitic types and size, prosodic words and their shape, word stress location, and syllable type by position within the word and/or status relative to word stress. Useful applications of FreP in general linguistics, phonology, language acquisition and development, speech evaluation and therapy are also described. Forthcoming extensions of the tool include the ability to extract frequency information for different varieties of Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese in particular, and the ability to provide a SAMPA output from the written text, together with the frequency of segmental features, like manner, place of articulation and laryngeal features. Updated information on FreP can be found at http://www.fl.ul.pt/LaboratorioFonetica/FreP.

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