The Perception of /pt/ and /kt/ in European and Brazilian Portuguese

This study is concerned with consonant clusters in two varieties of Portuguese, Brazilian (BP) and European (EP) and more specifically with whether the two varieties differ in the way that consonants are synchronized with each other. Two further aims were to test whether the synchronization was influenced by place of articulation and whether perceptual responses to a cluster were influenced by the listener's variety. Twenty-one L1 EP and 16 L1 BP speakers participated in a forced choice perception experiment in which they judged whether medial /C1t/ clusters (C1 = /p, t/) excised from real words produced by one EP, and one BP speaker had been reduced to a singleton /t/ or not. Listeners were more inclined to perceive a singleton /t/ in EP clusters which is consistent with the idea of a tighter temporal synchrony between the consonants in EP than for BP. They were also more inclined to perceive a singleton /t/ in /kt/ than in /pt/ clusters but there were no differences between Brazilian and Portuguese listeners' responses to the same stimuli. Taken together, the results show that there is a greater asynchrony between the consonant of a cluster for medial labials than for medial velars and between BP than EP clusters.