Word stress perception in European Portuguese

Previous research has reported stress "deafness" for languages with predictable stress, like French, contrary to languages with non-predictable stress, like Spanish ([1], [2], [3], [4]). The contrastive nature of stress appears to inhibit stress "deafness", but segmental and/or suprasegmental cues may also enhance stress discrimination ([5], [6]). In this study we carried out two experiments aiming to investigate stress perception in European Portuguese (EP), a language with non-predictable stress that utilizes duration and vowel reduction as main cues to stress. We used nonsense words that differed only in stress location, thus removing vowel reduction as a cue to stress. Experiment 1 was an ABX discrimination task ([1]). Experiment 2 was a sequence recall task ([2]). In both experiments, the stress contrast condition was compared with a phoneme control condition, in nuclear and post-nuclear position. Results of both experiments strongly suggest a stress "deafness" effect in EP. Despite its variable nature, word stress is hardly perceived by EP native-speakers in the absence of vowel reduction. These findings have implications for claims on prosodic-based cross-linguistic perception of word stress in the absence of vowel quality, and for stress "deafness" as a consequence of a predictable stress grammar.