Phonological knowledge of a language involves knowledge about which segments can be combined under what conditions. Languages vary in the quantity and quality of licensed combinations, in particular sequences of consonants, with Polish being a language with a large inventory of such combinations. The present paper reports on a two-session experiment in which Polish-speaking adult participants l...

All languages allow stop place contrasts in prevocalic position. Many languages allow stop place contrasts before liquids [l, r]. Indeed, stop-liquid clusters like [br, gl] are among the most common word-initial consonant clusters [2]. The preference for stop-liquid clusters is commonly attributed to Sonority Sequencing constraints – specifically a preference for large sonority rises in onset c...

Syllables play an important role in speech synthesis and recognition. We present several different approaches to the syllabification of phonemes. We investigate approaches based on linguistic theories of syllabification, as well as a discriminative learning technique that combines Support Vector Machine and Hidden Markov Model technologies. Our experiments on English, Dutch and German demonstra...

this article provides an overview of natural phonological processes in the dialect of sistani persian spoken in iranian sistan, and reviews theoretical implications of these processes. a representative selection of processes in the language is examined in reference to conditioning by surrounding segments and conditioning in reference to syllable structure. while assimilation and dissimilation a...

Georgian is one of several languages which allows consonant sequences not predicted by the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP). The goal of the present study is to formulate a new generalization regarding consonant sequencing in Georgian, one not necessarily relying on the SSP. This generalization refers to observed preferences for combinations of certain feature specifications in the sequences...

Evolution of languages has always been of interest to linguists.  In this paper we study  the natural progress of the syllable structure from Old  Persian  (O.P)  to Middle Persian (Mi.P) and up to the Modern Persian (Mo.P). For this purpose all the words containing consonant sequences are collected from specific sources of each  of these  languages,  and then  analysed  according to the syllab...

Modern Persian permits coda clusters, many of which violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle. In a syllable counting task, Persian speakers consistently perceived clusters in CVCC target items as monosyllabic, whereas English speakers generally perceived clusters existing in English as monosyllabic but those not existing in English as bi-syllabic. Moreover, the latter were perceived as monosyl...

According to previous investigations of gestural patterning, consonant gestures exhibit less temporal overlap in a syllable/word onset than in a coda or across syllables. Additionally, front-to-back order of place of articulation in stop-stop sequences (labial-coronal, coronal-dorsal, labial-dorsal) exhibits more overlap than the opposite order. One possible account for these differences is tha...

It has been well documented that language specific cues—such as transitional probability (TP), stress and phonotactics—can be used for word segmentation. In our current work, we investigate what role a phonological universal, the sonority sequencing principle (SSP), may also play. Participants were presented with an unsegmented stream of speech from an artificial language with non-English onset...

This work asks how the syllable as a unit is delimited in space and time. To do this we bring together two theoretical approaches to syllable: sonority-based approach which emphasizes spatial organization, coupled oscillator model (Nam, Goldstein & Saltzman 2009) temporal organization. Many languages present challenges these theories, here focus on Georgian, problematic for both approaches,...