It has long been known that, in clusters, /s/ fails to respect the phonotactic constraints that hold of other obstruents. For example, while branching onsets must rise in sonority in the vast majority of languages, no such requirement holds of /s/-initial clusters. In fact, the optimal sC cluster across languages is /s/+stop in shape (Goad 2011). Although this would appear to be perceptual suic...

This study investigates the acquisition and representation of geminate plosives liquids in speech Ammani Arabic (AA) children aged from 2;6 (year; month) to 5 years, at six months intervals. Although gemination is perceived properly by AA an early stage, which they produce words including geminates significantly longer than with singletons, acoustic measurements indicate that children’s phoneti...

In this article, the low back vowel /A/ in word-final positions in Eghlidian dialect, one of Persian dialects, is studied. This vowel is represented phonetically as [A], [o] and [@] in different phonetic environments. Therefore many words were collected via interviewing ten native speakers so that these different alternant forms can be accounted for appropriately. Since one of the authors of th...

The special status of word-initial /s/-consonant clusters has long been observed by researchers: Some /s/-initial sequences, such as /s/-stop clusters, violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle. In English, /s/ is the only word-initial consonant that may be followed by another homorganic consonant (e.g. /st-/, /sn-/), by either a nasal or a stop (e.g. /sm-/, /sn-/, /sp-/), or by a two-element c...

A system for online recognition of handwritten Telugu script is presented. A handwritten character is constructed by executing a sequence of strokes. A structureor shape-based representation of a stroke is used in which a stroke is represented as a string of shape features. Using this string representation, an unknown stroke is identified by comparing it with a database of strokes. A full chara...

This study presents articulatory data on the durational and timing characteristics of Russian onset clusters and their change as a function of speaking rate. While there is increasing evidence that languages differ systematically in their consonant-to-consonant timing, little is known on whether this difference also entails different implementations of speaking rate changes. Russian contrasts w...

In this study the effect of phonotactic constraints concerning word-initial consonant clusters in children with delayed phonological acquisition was explored. Twelve German-speaking children took part (mean age 5;1). The spontaneous speech of all children was characterized by the regular appearance of the error patterns fronting, e.g., Kuh ‘‘cow’’ /ku:/ ! [tu:], or stopping, e.g., Schaf ‘‘sheep...

Empirically, the onset-rhyme structure of the syllable has been revealed in several experiments using word-games. The simplest games used monosyllabic words C(C)VC(C) presented as auditory stimuli (Trieman, 1983, 1985). In most of Treiman’s work, participants were asked to coin a new word from given pairs of words. The participants created new words using perceived inner boundaries, usually loc...