Sonority-driven stress: codas in Brazilian Portuguese

This study provides empirical evidence for sonority-driven stress in Brazilian Portuguese. Using auditory forced-choice and orthographic tasks with nonce words, we demonstrate that speakers systematically prefer final stress when final syllables contain sonorant codas {N, l, r} compared to the obstruent coda {s}. Our data reveal that coda sonority influences stress preferences beyond traditional weight distinctions. Lexical analysis of monomorphemic words corroborates experimental findings, showing that s-final words receive final stress less frequently than sonorant-final words.