Phonetic evidence is presented to contribute to a possible explanation of how historical coronalization of labialized velars in front vowel environments may take place. Sound changes of labialized velar /kw/ to coronal /t/ before front vowels /i, e/ are reconstructed for the development of Greek from Indo-European. Philological accounts tend to propose progressive fronting/palatalization preced...

The aim of the study was to establish whether /u/-fronting, a sound change in progress in standard southern British, could be linked synchronically to the fronting effects of a preceding anterior consonant both in speech production and speech perception. For the production study, which consisted of acoustic analyses of isolated monosyllables produced by two different age groups, it was shown fo...

The lexical items preceding the nite verb in German V2 clauses have traditionally been analyzed as a fronted constituent that forms part of an unbounded dependency construction. We examine this hypothesis and, based on certain properties of unbounded dependencies, we conclude that the initial constituent in V2 clauses can be licensed by two distinct processes: Clause-bound adjunction of adverbi...

The current study employs a contrastive approach to analyze five consonantal features (TH stopping/ fronting, L vocalization, [n, l]/[s, ?] conflation, /r/, /v/, /w/ substitution and consonant cluster modification [CCM]) of Hong Kong English (HKE) from 37 online sound clips 29 speakers. Compared the traditional approach, uses world Englishes paradigm data, which aligns more with recent movement...

Speyer (2008) finds an overall decline in the rate of topicalization in historical English, which we refer to pretheoretically as direct object fronting. He attributes it to two separate phenomena: 1) the early loss of unaccented pronominal and demonstrative fronting, and 2) a gradient decline in the use of accented, contrastive fronting due to prosodic well-formedness conditions imposed by the...

The present study is concerned with lax /u/-fronting in Standard British English and in particular with whether this sound change in progress can be attributed to a waning of the perceptual compensation for the coarticulatory effects of context. Younger and older speakers produced various monosyllables in which /u/ occurred in different symmetrical consonantal contexts. The same speakers partic...

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...