Speech errors follow the phonotactics of the language being spoken. For example, in English, if [n] is mispronounced as [n], the [n] will always appear in a syllable coda. The authors created an analogue to this phenomenon by having participants recite lists of consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in 4 sessions on different days. In the first 2 experiments, some consonants were always onsets, so...

Syllable fusion is a Hong Kong Cantonese connected speech process, whereby edges of syllables are obscured by consonant lenition or deletion, and vowel reduction. More extreme fusion can simplify contour tones and merge the qualities of vowels that would be separated by an onset or coda consonant at more normal degrees of disjuncture between words. This paper investigates the influence of speec...

Maintaining voicing in obstruents is articulatorily challenging. During obstruent closure, intraoral air pressure goes up quickly, and as a consequence it becomes difficult to maintain a sufficient transglottal air pressure drop to produce voicing. This difficulty becomes more problematic in geminates, which have long closures (Hayes and Steriade 2004; Jaeger 1978; Ohala 1983; Westbury 1979). R...

hiatus is a situation in which there is no consonant between the nuclei of two adjacent syllables. it occurs when the left syllable lacks a coda while the right one lacks an onset. hiatus occurs in underlying representation or at a level between underlying and phonetic representations. its occurrence is expected in every language, but its resolution is obligatory in languages which require syll...

in order to simplify the pronunciation ofthe adult's words,children use phonological processes inthe initial years oftheir speech growth.the present study aims at considering phonological processes ina group oftwo tofour-year old farsi speaking children.the results indicate that itisnot possible to correctly and precisely account forthe occurrences ofsuch processes in children’s pronunciat...

Kim, Hyung-Soo. 2003. A new look at partial reduplication in Korean. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 0.0. 00-000. An approach based on the phonological process of dissimilation turns out to do a better job of explaining the so-called asymmetry and delaryngealization in partial reduplication of ideophonic words in Korean than any of previous constraint-based analyses, including th...

This paper presents an acoustic and electropalatographic study of how vowel-less syllables and their constituents are phonetically implemented in Tashlhiyt Berber. Three issues are addressed. First, we determine whether the acoustic and articulatory make-up of a consonant changes as a function of its position within a syllable (C-nucleus vs. C-onset vs. C-coda). Second, we consider the patterns...

It is often suggested that languages are likely to ‘compensate’ complexity in one subsystem by simplicity elsewhere. In this paper evidence against this idea is presented by examining several subsystems of the basic phonology in a set of over 600 languages selected to represent genetic and areal diversity. The relationships between elaboration of the syllable canon, the size of segment inventor...

Use of precise consonantal information while learning new words has been established for onset consonants in previous studies, which showed that infants as young as 16 to 20 months of age can simultaneously learn two new words that differ only by a syllable-initial consonant (Havy & Nazzi, 2009; Nazzi, 2005; Nazzi & New, 2007; Werker, Fennell, Corcoran, & Stager, 2002). However, there is no sys...