The refugee crisis : effects and challenges

Atualmente, a recente crise de refugiados levou a que este tema assumisse um elevado nível de importância, sendo que as suas consequências se estendem a um grande número de países. De um ponto de vista positivo, é mencionado o crescimento económico a longo-prazo como uma consequência do desenvolvimento dos mercados e do aumento do capital humano. Contudo, no "outro lado da moeda", a despesa pública aumenta, as taxas de desemprego podem crescer e existe a possibilidade da ocorrência de confrontos de cariz étnico e religioso. A nível Europeu, a falta de fundos é uma preocupação, tal como a cooperação com instituições relevantes. No caso Português, ainda menos informação está disponível, pelo que o impacto dos refugiados não pode ser estudado, até pela pouca expressão que o grupo assume para já. Assim, o foco é nos desafios com os quais o país se depara, como o défice demográfico e capacity building. O objetivo consiste em realizar, maioritariamente, uma contribuição teórica para serem ultrapassadas algumas falhas, tanto a nível internacional como nacional, em termos de políticas de integração de modo a minimizar os problemas existentes e maximizar os potenciais benefícios. É concluído que é necessário um maior esforço da comunidade internacional para serem criadas soluções plausíveis, sendo que existe falta de consciência dos instrumentos legais que possibilitam resultados positivos, levando à total integração destes indivíduos. No caso Português, é essencial que o tema dos refugiados seja considerado de forma a implementar politicas transversais.Nowadays, the recent refugee crisis made this issue an important one with consequences that are extended to a large number of countries. From a positive point of view, long-term economic growth is mentioned as a consequence of the development of the markets and of the increase of human capital. However, in the "other half of the coin", public expenditure increases, unemployment rates may rise and there may be clashes of an ethical and religious nature. At an European level, lack of funds is a real concern, as well as the cooperation with relevant organizations. In the Portuguese case, even less information is available, so the impact of the refugees cannot be understood, even by the relatively small expression this group assumes until current days. So, the focus is on challenges such as the demographic deficit and capacity building. The aim of this work is to mostly make a theoretical contribution so as to overcome existing gaps at both international and national levels in terms of integration policies in order to minimize problems and maximize potential benefits. It is concluded that it is necessary a greater effort from the international community to create a plausible resolution, and there is a lack of awareness of legal instruments that allow positive results, leading to the full integration of these individuals into society. In the case of Portugal, it is essential that the issue of refugees be taken into account in order to implement transversal policies

Speaker sex effects on temporal and spectro-temporal measures of speech

This study investigated speaker sex differences in the temporal and spectro-temporal parameters of English monosyllabic words spoken by thirteen women and eleven men. Vowel and utterance duration were investigated. A number of formant frequency parameters were also analysed to assess the spectro-temporal dynamic structures of the monosyllabic words as a function of speaker sex. Absolute frequency changes were measured for the first (F1), second (F2), and third (F3) formant frequencies (ΔF1, ΔF2, and ΔF3, respectively). Rates of these absolute formant frequency changes were also measured and calculated to yield measurements for rF1, rF2, and rF3. Normalised frequency changes (normΔF1, normΔF2, and normΔF3), and normalised rates of change (normrF1, normrF2, and normrF3) were also calculated. F2 locus equations were then derived from the F2 measurements taken at the onset and temporal mid points of the vowels. Results indicated that there were significant sex differences in the spectro-temporal parameters associated with F2: ΔF2, normΔF2, rF2, and F2 locus equation slopes; women displayed significantly higher values for ΔF2, normΔF2 and rF2, and significantly shallower F2 locus equation slopes. Collectively, these results suggested lower levels of coarticulation in the speech samples of the women speakers, and corroborate evidence reported in earlier studies

Detecting categorical perception in continuous discrimination data

We present a method for assessing categorical perception from continuous discrimination data. Until recently, categorical perception of speech has exclusively been measured by discrimination and identification experiments with a small number of different stimuli, each of which is presented multiple times. Experiments by Rogers and Davis (2009), however, suggest that using non-repeating stimuli yields a more reliable measure of categorization. If this idea is applied to a single phonetic continuum, the continuum has to be densely sampled and the obtained discrimination data is nearly continuous. In the present study, we describe a maximum-likelihood method that is appropriate for analysing such continuous discrimination data

The beauty in a beast: Minimising the effects of diverse recording quality on vowel formant measurements in sociophonetic real-time studies

Sociophonetic real-time studies of vowel variation and change rely on acoustic analyses of sound recordings made at different times, often using different equipment and data collection procedures. The circumstances of a recording are known to affect formant tracking and may therefore compromise the validity of conclusions about sound changes made on the basis of real-time data. In this paper, a traditional F1/F2-analysis using linear predictive coding (LPC) was applied to the vowels /i u a/ extracted from spontaneous speech corpora of Glaswegian vernacular, that were recorded in the 1970s and 2000s. We assessed the technical quality of each recording, concentrating on the average levels of noise and the properties of spectral balance, and showed that the corpus comprised of mixed quality data. A series of acoustic vowel analyses subsequently unveiled that formant measurements using LPC were sensitive to the technical specification of a recording, with variable magnitudes of the effects for vowels of different qualities. We evaluated the performance of three commonly used formant normalisation procedures (Lobanov, Nearey and Watt-Fabricius) as well as normalisations by a distance ratio metric and statistical estimation, and compared these results to raw Bark-scaled formant data, showing that some of the approaches could ameliorate the impact of technical issues better than the others. We discuss the implications of these results for sociophonetic research that aims to minimise extraneous influences on recorded speech data while unveiling gradual, potentially small-scale sound changes across decades