Propelled by existing research on stop consonant variability in Spanish, this pilot study provides a preliminary acoustic analysis of lenition exhibited speakers six different varieties Spanish Latin America and Spain to explore the gradient production /ptk/ /bdɡ/ among varieties. Using correlate relative intensity, considers effect various linguistic factors (phoneme, lexical stress, point art...

We asked whether invariant phonetic indices for syllable structure can be identified in a language where word-initial consonant clusters, regardless of their sonority profile, are claimed to be parsed heterosyllabically. Four speakers of Moroccan Arabic were recorded, using Electromagnetic Articulography. Pursuing previous work, we employed temporal diagnostics for syllable structure, consistin...

The argument is made on the basis of constraints that have the same functional basis, but distinct formal properties: ONSET and *ONSET/X (§2). If phonetic factors are projected directly onto phonological constraints, then the shared functional basis of these constraints should entail that they cannot be formally distinct. Specifically, the direct-phonetics model predicts that ONSET is actually ...

Morphological and phonological processes are tightly interrelated in spoken production. During processing, morphological processes must combine the phonological content of individual morphemes to produce a phonological representation that is suitable for driving phonological processing. Further, morpheme assembly frequently causes changes in a word's phonological well-formedness that must be ad...

This paper addresses the on-going debate over the distinction between Agreement by Correspondence (Hansson 2001; Rose and Walker 2004; a.o.) and the previously dominant theory of autosegmental feature spreading, focusing on a key conceptual difference between the two theories: the role of similarity as the basis of harmony patterns. It is argued that Agreement by Correspondence’s unique ability...

Perception of an epenthetic vowel within illegal, nonnative, clusters has been reported for a number of stimulus vs. listener language situations. In this study we examine the perception of a prothetic /e/ before word-initial #sC clusters by Spanish vs. French listeners, using gated stimuli derived from naturally produced /#as/+C and /#es/+C utterances. Spanish listeners but not French listener...

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 ...

We address the question of the relationship between two time series associated to the speech signal. The first one is the sonority function which was introduced in Galves et al. (2002) as an index of the local regularity of the speech signal. The second time series is the intra-oral pressure during the production of speech. We argue that the joint evolution of both time series can be well descr...