Professor Simões is a leading specialist in contrastive studies of Portuguese and Spanish. He has published pioneering works in this area, especially the well-known textbook Pois não - Brazilian Portuguese Course for Spanish Speakers, used in language programs across the US and abroad for a varied audience of speakers of Spanish, heritage speakers, and people interested in bilingual studies, among others. Currently, Professor Simões’ research work focuses on the speech prosody of these two languages with an extended interest in other languages.  His method of analysis is based on data collected from speech transcriptions using musical notation of spontaneous speech.

• Acknowledgments.- Preface.- Introduction.- Phonetics and Phonology: The Basics.- The Physics, Articulation, and Perception of Speech Sounds.- Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese: History and Regional Varieties.- Speech Prosody.- The Sound Segments of MSp and MBP.- Spanish and Portuguese Consonants.- Speech Transcriptions: Spanish and Portuguese.- Speech Prosody and Speech Melodies.- Appendix.- Bibliography.- Glossary.- General Index.