Fluency proﬁle: comparison between Brazilian and European Portuguese speakers

The purpose of the study was to compare the speech fluency of Brazilian Portuguese speakers with that of European Portuguese speakers. The study participants were 76 individuals of any ethnicity or skin color aged 18–29 years. Of

speech rate. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were performed to assess the association between the fluency profile and linguistic variant variables. We found that the speech rate of European Portuguese speakers was higher than the speech rate of Brazilian Portuguese speakers in words per minute (p=0.004).
The qualitative distribution of the typology of common dysfluencies (p<0.001) also discriminated between the linguistic variants. While a speech fluency profile of European Portuguese speakers is not available, speech therapists in Portugal can use the same speech fluency assessment as has been used in Brazil to establish a diagnosis of stuttering, especially in regard to typical and stuttering dysfluencies, with care taken when evaluating the speech rate.  (1) , including semantic, morphosyntactic, phonetic/phonological, among others. The differences between Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) go beyond the segmental level, reaching the prosodic level (2,3) . It is questioned, then, if the speech language fluency patterns, the aim of this study, would also present their particularities in EP and BP.

RESUMO
The parameters commonly used to objectively assess speech fluency are the common dysfluencies, stuttering dysfluencies, speech discontinuity percentage or total rupture rate, percentage of stuttered syllables, and speech rate (4) ; the last one is also called elocution and/or articulation rate (5,6) .
Assessing fluency is extremely relevant to provide parameters on the effectiveness of language, rather than only diagnosing stuttering (12) and other communication disorders. In this sense, studies providing reference values for fluent speakers, considering the particularities of each language, are important to increase the accuracy of diagnosis (7) .
The objective of this work was to compare fluency parameters of native adult speakers of BP and EP.

METHODS
This research was considered and approved by the research ethics committee of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais under the protocol CAAE 01460612.4.0000.5149, authorized by the Department of Speech Language Therapy of the Universidade do Algarve (Portugal). All participants signed the informed consent term.
This study comprised melhor included 76 subjects of both gender, with no distinction as for race and color, with 38 of them living in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte (the capital of the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil)and 38 of them living in the city of Faro (District capital of Faro, in the region of Algarve, Portugal). All subjects were aged between 18 and 29 years.
As an exclusion criteria, the participants could not present personal and/or family complaints of stuttering and/or communication or health deficits that would impair speech language production.
The methodology used to collect and analyze the speech samples considered the following fluency parameters: rupture typology (common dysfluencies: hesitation, interjection, revision, repetition of words and/or segment and/or phrase, and unfinished word; stuttering dysfluencies: repetition of syllables and/or sounds, prolongations, blocking, pause, and intrusion of sound and/or segment); speech rate, in words per minute; and rupture frequency (speech discontinuity percentage and stuttering dysfluencies) (13) .
A descriptive analysis of the data was performed, calculating values such as the median, mean, and standard deviation. To analyze the independence between the studied groups, we used the χ 2 -test. To compare the medians, we used the nonparametric Mann-Whitney test. A significance level of 5% was considered.

RESULTS
In relation to the typology of dysfluencies, Table 1 shows the values found for BP and EP, as well as their qualitative distribution. Speakers of both groups were compared for each dysfluency typology. The variable "hesitation" presented a significant difference (p=0.006), with higher median to the EP speakers (9.0 versus 7.0). The variables "segment repetition" and "sound repetition" also presented significant difference (p=0.005 and p=0.048, respectively). Despite the medians being the same (less than zero), they do not distribute equally among the countries, with higher values for the BP speakers.

Brazilian
The results and the comparison of parameters of the fluency profile are shown in Table 2.

DISCUSSION
This study raised the speech fluency profile of a group of young adult speakers of the BP variant spoken in Minas Gerias (variante mineira) and a group of young adult speakers of the EP variant spoken in Algarve (variante algárvia). As for the total number of common and stuttering dysfluencies, both BP and EP presented results close to those described in the literature (4,14) . Despite not being quantitatively different, a qualitative difference was observed in the typology of the dysfluencies: in BP, the review, the unfinished word, and the segment repetition were the most often found dysfluencies, whereas EP speakers used hesitation and word repetition more often.
Due to the reduced number of informants in this research, which figures as an initial attempt to raise questions regarding the variability between BP and EP, it is suggested that a deeper study on the typology of dysfluencies should be conducted to better clarify this particularity. However, while the fluency profile of EP adults is not established, the normality values of the six parameters of fluency may be used in the assessment of these individuals.
Regarding the speech rate, EP speakers present higher rates than BP ones only when it comes to words per minute, without statistical difference as for syllables per minute. One of the possible explanations for this difference is the qualitative distribution of the dysfluencies: in BP, more review dysfluencyis observed. In a study on the dysfluency of review, the authors agreed that there was a decrease in speech rate in the moment of pronunciation of this dysfluency (8) , which could, in relation to segmental and suprasegmental levels, influence this parameter. Another explanation would be the high standard deviation, a fact observed in several studies on speech rate (5,7,9) .
Although studies that considered the measure syllable per minute presented results with some variation, in BP we considered that these values may vary between 202.9 and 247.6 (4,5,10,14) . They agreed on the findings of this study for both BP and EP.

CONCLUSION
The parameters analyzed in this study on fluency profile point toward a tendency for similarity between BP and EP. However, it was observed that the speech rate of EP speakers is higher than that of BP speakers in words per minute. Despite the number of common dysfluencies being similar, their qualitative distribution differentiates the languages from one another. In BP, we found a higher frequency of reviews, unfinished words, and segment repetition, whereas EP speakers present more hesitation and repetition of words.
*BSAC was responsible for the collection and tabulation of the data and elaboration of the manuscript; ACB supervised data collection and elaboration of the manuscript; LCC and VOMR were responsible for the project and design of the study and overall guidance of execution steps and elaboration of the manuscript.