Information on the frequency of phonological objects in the languages of the world, Portuguese included, is still scarce. This kind of information is relevant for fundamental research on areas such as the phonology of particular languages, linguistic universals/general trends, acquisition and development of phonology, L2 learning, and bilingual studies. Frequency is also an obvious source for establishing regular and deviating patterns in language use. Knowledge of such patterns is essential in domains like the diagnostic, evaluation and therapy of deviant/pathological speech, evaluation of proficiency of first and second language learners, or forensics. The project Frequency Patterns of Phonological Objects in Portuguese - Research and Applications aims at contributing to this field. One of the outputs of the project is the FrePOP (Frequency of Phonological Objects in Portuguese) database: 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 population (by age, sex, education and profession) may be obtained, as well as for different historical periods (from the XVI century onwards) and types of corpora (please refer to the manual for details). The FrePOP includes information on prosodic words, clitics, syllables, segments and stress patterns. The basis of the FrePOP is a set of corpora with over 3.5 million orthographic words. The frequency data in the FrePOP were obtained with the FreP tool (Martins, F., M. Vigário & S. Frota. 2009. FreP - Frequências no Português. Software. IGAC, 5969/2009).

 

The FrePOP Lexicon, the CDS_EP - A lexicon of Child Directed Speech from the FrePOP database (0;11 to 3;04), and PLEX5 - A production lexicon of child speech for European Portuguese are also available to FrePOP registered users.

 

We gratefully acknowledge the collaboration of all institutions and individuals that contributed with their corpora to the FrePOP (see the full list in About). We also thank all the research assistants that made FrePOP possible, namely Nuno Matos, Nuno Paulino, and João Lourenço.

 

FrePOP (version 1.0) Copyright © 2010

Frota, S., M. Vigário, F. Martins & M. Cruz. Laboratório de Fonética (CLUL), Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa. ISBN: 978-989-95713-2-7. ISLRN: 064-984-771-090-2