c - Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto

Abstract
The present dissertation aims to contribute to an understanding of the
interface between spoken and written language, namely in European
Portuguese. It presents a useful tool for research in the psychology of
language, the Porlex lexical database - a working model of the adult lexicon
in European Portuguese -, and a series of studies guided by theoretical ideas
from neurocognitive approaches to language. Specifically, this work is
divided into four major parts: the presentation of Porlex (Chapter 1), a
structural analysis of the adult lexicon (Chapter 2), an analysis of the
orthography of the European Portuguese (Chapter 3), and an experimental
study of the foundational level of reading acquisition (Chapter 4).
In the first chapter, the rationale for the database is presented, as well as
the database itself. It consists of about 30 thousand uninfected words, and
45 different types of information for each of them. Each entry consists of
the full orthographic representation of the word (including diacritics),
followed by the corresponding phonetic and phonological transcriptions,
and a specification of variables like word class and gender, word length (in
phonemes, graphemes, and syllables), phonetic pattern, uniqueness point,
and neighbourhood density.
In the second chapter, a structural analysis of the adult lexicon is
presented, based on the Porlex database. Two types of analyses are