This study accounts for the acquisition of the consonant clusters of English syllable structures both in onset and coda positions by Persian EFL learners. Persian syllable structure is "CV(CC)", composed of one consonant at the initial position and two optional consonants at the final position; whereas English syllable structure is "(CCC)V(CCCC)". Therefore, Persian EFL learners need to resolve...

OBJECTIVES The aim was to explore whether word-initial onset awareness is acquired before phoneme awareness and whether onset complexity influences performance on identification tasks. In addition, the relationship between onset and phoneme awareness and letter knowledge was investigated. METHOD In this study, 22 monolingual German-speaking preschool children aged 5;00-5;11 were tested. Onset...

We recorded articulatory data to investigate the influence of consonantal coarticulation resistance on consonant-vowel timing in Polish onset clusters. While recent studies found different onset-vowel timing patterns depending on the position of the sibilant within the cluster, it is widely unknown how onset-vowel timing interacts with different degrees of coarticulation resistance of the vowel...

Recent applications of the hierarchical theory of the syllable to the development of explicit speech segmentation are critically examined. One particular prediction, that an initial consonant is more easily isolated when it constitutes the complete onset of a syllable than when it is part of a cluster onset, was tested on children with grade levels ranging from kindergarten to second grade. At ...

A series of vowel-identification experiments using gated consonant stimuli shows that English listeners are capable of recovering the vocalic context in which a consonant appears from information contained in the consonant alone. This is true for most consonants tested, including liquids, nasals, and stops in onset and coda position. Positional asymmetries in vowel sensitivity go in opposite di...

It is well-known that consonant clusters obeying the sonority sequencing principle are universally preferred over clusters violating it; what is less clear is the status of sonority violating clusters in languages that have them. These clusters could betray their typological " markedness " by differing from sonority-obeying clusters in the same language. However, it may actually be the case tha...

This paper aims to examine how the consonant clusters and illicit codas are modified in Mandarin loanwords transliterated from English, and to argue that no rules need to be involved and that a purely constraint-based approach—within the framework of Optimality Theory—can explain the data. The data collected from transliterated American state names and state names display the onset-coda inconsi...

Mismatch negativity (MMN) was used to investigate the processing of cluster and noncluster initial consonants in consonant-vowel syllables in the human brain. The MMN was elicited by either syllable with cluster or noncluster initial consonant, phonetic contrasts being identical in both syllables. Compared to the noncluster consonant, the cluster consonant elicited a more prominent MMN. The MMN...

The aim of the study was to investigate gender-dependent differences in the realization of German glottalized vowel onsets. Laryngographic data of semi-spontaneous speech were collected from four male and four female speakers of Standard German. Measurements of relative vocal fold contact duration were carried out including glottalized vowel onsets as well as non-glottalized controls. The resul...