One common cultural organizing principle is event sequencing. This article describes and illustrates two widespread examples of this kind of organization, cultural routines, and cultural templates. Cultural routines organize recurrent activities in time and space. Cultural templates rely on causally linked sequences of more abstract events to support reasoning and narrative. Why should so much ...

Previous research has shown that speakers do not produce all non-native phonotactic sequences with equal accuracy. Several reasons for these accuracy differences have been proposed, including markedness, analogical extension from permitted sequences, and language-independent phonetic factors. In this study, evidence from the production of unattested obstruent-initial onset clusters by English a...

We investigated the alignment of F0 peaks in disyllabic target words in polar questions and contrastive statements in Tashlhiyt Berber, concentrating on cases where both syllables contained a sonorant nucleus. Peak location, interpreted as H tone association, is not only determined by the communicative function of the utterance, but also by sonority and syllable weight, with a preference for mo...

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 and transitional probabilities. Participants ...

Sequence-based XML indexing aims at avoiding expensive join operations in query processing. It transforms structured XML data into sequences so that a structured query can be answered holistically through subsequence matching. In this paper, we address the problem of query equivalence with respect to this transformation, and we introduce a performance-oriented principle for sequencing tree stru...

Of course, if (2) holds, (1) and (3) are equivalent – but there might well be languages where (2) turns out to be false, but the other two statements are true. In fact, every language where consonant clusters are disallowed as codas but permitted as onsets is a counterexample to (2), and the same holds for those languages that allow complex codas but do not allow complex onsets. Before turning ...

In both tone and intonation systems, segmental context is known to influence production and perception of target F0 contours in various ways. Many languages, for example, prefer to realize critical F0 events during maximally sonorous intervals, either by varying the timing of pitch movements, or by virtue of distributional limitations on certain contour types. Current analytic practice, by cont...

Are the phonological representations of printed and spoken words isomorphic? This question is addressed by investigating the restrictions on onsets. Cross-linguistic research suggests that onsets of rising sonority are preferred to sonority plateaus, which, in turn, are preferred to sonority falls (e.g., bnif [symbol: see text] bdif [symbol: see text] lbif). Of interest is whether these grammat...