Armando de Lacerda and Experimental Phonetics in the inter-war period: scientific innovation and circulation between Portugal, Germany and Harvard

Abstract

In the history of the research on human speech, the work carried out by Armando de Lacerda, a 20th-century Portuguese phonetician, is of great importance. A specialist in Experimental Phonetics at the Phonetics Laboratory in Hamburg and the Institute of Phonetics in Bonn from 1930 to 1933, Lacerda established the first laboratory of Experimental Phonetics in Portugal, in Coimbra in 1936, whose "splendid technical facilities", along with the international prestige of its founder and director, attracted countless foreign scientists. In this paper, we highlight the discovery of some important scientific material used at the laboratory, recently unearthed in the reserve collection of the Museu da Ciência da Universidade de Coimbra, including documents and instruments, some of them created by Lacerda, whose inventorship deserves recognition.