It has been well documented how language-specific cues may be used for word segmentation. Here, we investigate what role a language-independent phonological universal, the sonority sequencing principle (SSP), may also play. Participants were presented with an unsegmented speech stream with non-English word onsets that juxtaposed adherence to the SSP with transitional probabilities. Participants...

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...

for their invaluable input into this paper. All errors are my own. The sonority scale that ranks phonemes according to relative " loudness " has long played a significant role in the fields of Phonology and Historical Linguistics, yet it is conspicuously absent from the speech recognition literature. In this preliminary study using the Hoosier Mental Lexicon, it was found that approximately hal...

Sonority is an important notion in phonology, but its definition has been controversial. Our analysis showed that sonority can be located in a multi-dimensional perceptual space, and that the dimensions of the space have correspondence to both acoustic parameters and phonological features. In the experiment, a confusion matrix was calculated from the results of consonant perception test for LPC...

The issues this paper addresses are the sonority conversion, which is defined as different ranking of sonority in a certain language, and the case taken from a variety of English. While Rhotic has larger sonority value than Lateral and Nasal in the general ranking, in Present-Day American English the tap, a rhotic, is less sonorous than the lateral and nasals but more sonorous than obstruents. ...

The Albanian language is traditionally divided between the Gheg dialect to geographic north and now Standard Tosk south. Recent literature of historically isolated Malsia Madhe (Dedvukaj 2022) has revealed a subdialect which not undergone specific phonological sound changes seen in both Modern dialects. distinct from dialects (Malsia) that it contains homorganic nasal-stop clusters positions wh...

Previous work on children's acquisition of complex sequences points to a tendency for affricates to be acquired before clusters, but there is no clear evidence of a difference in order of acquisition between clusters with /s/ that violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), such as /s/ followed by stop in onset position, and other clusters that obey the SSP. One problem with studies that h...

Previous work on children’s acquisition of complex sequences points to a tendency for affricates to be acquired before clusters, but there is no clear evidence of a difference in order of acquisition between clusters with /s/ that violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), such as /s/ followed by stop in onset position, and other clusters that obey the SSP. One problem with studies that h...