Abstract
This chapter examines vowel reduction among four European Portuguese speakers, focusing on mora loss and mora restoration as key processes. While traditional descriptions suggest a uniform reduction pattern, this chapter reveals individual variation in how unstressed vowels are realized. Mora loss causes unstressed vowels to lose their moras. High vowels /i/ and /u/ become their non-moraic counterparts, while mid vowels (/e, ɛ, o, ɔ/) may undergo centralization, raising, or even deletion. The low vowel /a/ further undergoes feature loss, reducing to schwa. Additionally, deletion occurs to some speakers, particularly for unstressed high glides. Significantly, some speakers exhibit mora restoration, selectively regaining moras for certain non-moraic heads, leading to diverse reduction patterns. The chapter emphasizes the role of acoustic analysis in uncovering subtle phonetic differences, showing that duration is a key factor in distinguishing moraic from non-moraic heads. The findings highlight the complexity of vowel reduction systems and suggest that phonological theories must account for speaker-specific variation and prosodic influences.