Secondary stress in Brazilian Portuguese: the interplay between production and perception studies

This paper reports experiments on speech production showing that secondary stress in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) can be best described as phrase-initial prominence cued by greater duration and pitch accent excursion in initial position. It also reports a perception experiment in which clicks were associated to consecutive V-to-V positions in stress groups. Mean click detection RTs are gradient, but show no influence of initial lengthening. RTs near the phrasally stressed position are shorter and almost 60% of RT variance can be accounted for by produced timing patterns.