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...

Cluster reduction is a common phenomenon in toddlers‟ productions. The question in this paper is how toddlers store target complex onsets in their mental lexicon: are cluster reductions the result of an incomplete lexical specification? We focus on cluster reductions in /sC/-onsets, like in [liːp] for „sleep‟. By means of a detailed acoustic analysis we compare toddlers‟ productions of target /...

In cross-language speech production, nonnative consonant clusters are often modified by epenthetic or transitional vocoids. Focusing on English speakers’ productions of nonnative stop-initial clusters (e.g., /bn/, /bd/), the present study identified several acoustic characteristics that distinguish cases of epenthesis from accurate cluster realizations. Both modified and accurate productions co...

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...

In 1913, Anton Pfalz described a specific relation of vowel and consonant sequences for East Middle Bavarian dialects, located in the eastern parts of Austria. According to his observations, a long vowel is always followed by a lenis consonant, and a short vowel is always followed by a fortis consonant. Consequently, vowel duration depends on the quality of the following consonant. Phonetic exa...

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...

Although studies of speech perception often focus on the interpretation of the acoustic speech waveform, in many situations the face of the talker can be seen by the listener and the perception of facial actions can greatly influence the interpretation of this signal. When the acoustic signal is unclear, observed facial actions can improve intelligibility [14]. On the other hand, even when the ...

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 ...

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...