Listeners of either French or Portuguese experienced word illusions in a word detection task by combining constituents of two dichotically-presented sequences. Consonants migrated to a greater extent in Portuguese than in French. This difference could stem from the influence of vocalic reduction in Portuguese. Alternatively, the difference could be due to the different stress patterns of the two languages.These alternative hypotheses were tested by examining Brazilian Portuguese, which does not show a degree of vocalic reduction as important as in European Portuguese. The results show that Brazilian perform more like the Portuguese than the French. They thus support the idea that stress patterns might be crucial in determining the nature of the language-dependent intermediate representations of speech.

Keywords: speech intermediate representations, influence of stress patterns and of vocalic reduction.