Recognizing Lexical Units in Portuguese

Abstract

Recognizing the lexical units in the speech chain in Portuguese is one of the most difficult problems in processing, as the listener must delimiting them, facing distortions, pauses and hesitations, in addition to sociolinguistic and contextual phonetic variants. Such phenomena indicate that, in a pre-lexical phase of recognition, the receiver restores the information received, with inferences through the crossing of contextual data extracted from utterances (intake) with those coming from their permanent memories (topdown processes). The boundaries between lexical units are opaque, particularly when they are clitic due to external closed juncture or sandhi. Spontaneous speech frequently presents distortions and ruptures, instead of signaling ways to the listener, for dividing the speech chain into larger, gradually smaller phrases, until reaching lexical units. There are even ruptures at the inframorphemic and even intrasyllabic level. The difficulty in delimiting is very great when the listener is faced with new words. The methodology is bibliographic and I  examined the texts of researchers who have addressed the topic. I conclude that the absence of isomorphy between the phonological and the morphosyntactic words challenges a scientific explanation of how the listener solves this contradiction, since, for the lexical item, she/he must pair the intake with the respective phonological lexical item in her/his mental dictionary.