This paper takes a computational/experimental approach to investigating faithfulness in input–output phonological mappings. We seek to explain the results of a speech production experiment recently reported in Davidson (2010). In that experiment, native English speakers were asked to produce phonotactically unattested consonant clusters. We argue that modifications of the target consonant clust...

We argue that preverbal and postverbal subject clitics in northern Italian dialects are the same lexical items. The different forms of proclitics and enclitics can be explained phonologically (i.e., by phonological constraints ranked in a particular order) and by the hypothesis that morphologically neutral vowels may be inserted in final position (what we call morphological epenthesis). The dis...

In Italian, consonant-final loan words are reportedly produced with or without a final schwa. This paper reveals that variation in the presence of this schwa is dependent on a number of factors, including the metrical structure of the target word and the voicing of the consonant. Crucially, it is also conditioned by intonation: Schwa is more likely to occur – and is acoustically more prominent ...

Dutch schwa-epenthesis in liquid+consonant clusters has been the subject of a “boundary dispute”, as to its phonetic or phonological status. There has been surprisingly little instrumental work on the phenomenon that could function as an arbiter in this dispute. This paper attempts to remedy this situation by bringing results from a corpus of sociophonetic variation data to bear on the issue, f...

This paper describes an architecture to convert Sinhala Unicode text into phonemic specification of pronunciation. The study was mainly focused on disambiguating schwa-/\/ and /a/ vowel epenthesis for consonants, which is one of the significant problems found in Sinhala. This problem has been addressed by formulating a set of rules. The proposed set of rules was tested using 30,000 distinct wor...

Some studies on training effects of pronunciation instruction have claimed that the prosodic features has at segmental level and level, with greater reported when prosody is main focus training. This paper revisits this claim by looking Italian learners German. In a pre-post-test design, we investigate acoustic changes after in learners’ productions two regarded as segmental. The were pitch exc...