Language Discrimination and Rhythm Classes: Evidence from Portuguese

This paper reports on two discrimination experiments involving Portuguese data. The findings support the prosodic contrast between EP and BP and stress the role played by intonation in this contrast. They also show that the perceptual distance between EP and BP is smaller than that between EP and Dutch. The robust distinction between EP and Dutch provides evidence for different perceptual weights of acoustic parameters, and points to the syllable-timed nature of EP