The Sonority Dispersion Principle (Clements, 1990) states that the sharper the rise in sonority between the beginning of the syllable and the nucleus, the better the syllable. So far evidence in favour of this principle has been derived mainly from the distributional properties of syllable types and, to a lesser extent, from language acquisition. The case of DB, presented in this study, provide...

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...

How should one syllabify medial homorganic nasal plus stop (-VNCV-) clusters in Hindi such as those in [] ‘tall’ and [] ‘pebble’? A variety of principles have been proposed by phonologists, the three most common ones being the ‘legality’ principle, ‘maximize onset’ principle, and the ‘sonority sequencing’ principle. In this paper we will attempt to show that all -VNCVclusters do not ...

Sonority is a property of segments that relates to phonotactics and syllable shape but whose nature remains in dispute. Clements (1990) uses this property to define the order that segments may occur in a syllable in what he calls the sonority sequencing principle (SSP), which says that “between any member of a syllable and the syllable peak, only sounds of higher sonority rank are permitted.” H...

The sonority principle is dramatically violated by some Russian onset clusters (e.g., [lba]) and not by others. Russian onset clusters therefore provide a good test of a phoneticallymotivated, alternative hypothesis to the sonority hierarchy; namely, the hypothesis that the primary constraint on the sequential organization of segments is the relatively independent close-open mandibular cycle. T...

In this paper we have investigated the syllabic structures found in Aromanian a Romance language spoken in the Balkans across multiple countries with important communities which spread from Greece to Romania. We have created a dictionary of syllabified words and analyzed a few general quantitative and phonological aspects of the dictionary. Furthermore, we have approached the syllabic complexit...

This article provides an overview of natural phonological processes in the dialect of Sistani Persian spoken in Iranian Sistan, and reviews theoretical implications of these processes. A representative selection of processes in the language is examined in reference to conditioning by surrounding segments and conditioning in reference to syllable structure. While assimilation and dissimilation a...

This study presents an overview of the different strategies that Persian learners of English employ to deal with initial clusters. While vowel epenthesis appears to be the most widespread repair strategy to conform such clusters to Persian phonotactics, the location of the epenthetic vowel varies. In this paper, we investigate two approaches that seek to explain the epenthetic site. The first o...

Jespersen’s sonority hierarchy fails to account for commonly observed syllable structures such as initial [spV], [stV] and [skV] and their final mirror images [Vps], [Vts] and [Vks]. It is likely, however, that stop place of articulation is signaled quite efficiently in these sequences since acoustic place information is present both before and after the stop, i.e., both in [s] and in the vowel...