Lancaster University is participating in an international project that will contribute a Brazilian Portuguese version to the Multilingual Picture (Multipic) database.

Multipic contains naming norms and familiarity scores for 500 coloured pictures in over 30 languages from around the world. This information is often essential for psycholinguistic experiments, especially for those that study language processing in monolingual and bilingual populations.

Professor Patrick Rebuschat, the director of Lancaster’s Camões Institute Chair for Multilingualism and Diversity, said: “A European Portuguese version already exists in Multipic, but a Brazilian Portuguese version is lacking. By adding this to the existing database, we will be able to compare the acquisition and processing of European and Brazilian Portuguese.”

The project team further includes Dr. Aina Casaponsa (Lancaster), Professor Montserrat Comesaña Vila (Minho), Professor Susana Correia (NOVA University Lisbon), Professor Juliana Novo Gomes (Porto), Professor Ingrid Finger (Rio Grande do Sul), Yun-Wei (Kelly) Lee (Lancaster), Ronan Pereira (NOVA University Lisbon) as well as the original developers of Multipic, Jon Andoni Dunabeitia (Madrid) and Christos Pliatsikas (Reading).

A description of the original Multipic project can be found in the Dunabeitia et al., 2022 paper and on the project website.

For more information on the Brazilian Portuguese project, please email catedra-camoes@lancaster.ac.uk. For questions about the European Portuguese version, please email Montserrat Comesaña, and for queries concerning the original Multipic database, please contact Jon Andoni Dunabeitia or Christos Pliatsikas directly.