0. Combinations of Sonority and Stress In their analysis of Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber syllabification, Prince and Smolensky (1993) postulate that different types of prominence, such as sonority and syllabicity, should align—a phenomenon they term prominence alignment. This concept is implemented by Prince and Smolensky using families of inherently-ranked constraints that are derived from combini...

Evidence is accumulating that native speaker-hearers are not as consistent, confident, or in agreement, on counting the number of syllables in natural utterances as is commonly assumed. There are, however, instances where speaker-hearers give clear, consistent syllable counts. It is position of this paper that the unclear cases as well as the clear cases are phonetically classifiable in terms o...

In this paper, the use of sonority measure as an acoustic feature of the speech signal for continuous automatic speech recognition is described. The representation of sonority extent of sounds is made with a help of spectrum derivation. Therefore, a novel articulatory motivated acoustic feature expressing the sonority is named spectrum derivative feature. The new feature is tested in combinatio...

We propose in this paper a language-independent method for syllable segmentation. The method is based on the Sonority Sequencing Principle, by which the sonority inside a syllable increases from its boundaries towards the syllabic nucleus. The sonority function employed was derived from the posterior probabilities of a broad phonetic class recognizer, trained with data coming from an open-sourc...

We propose in this paper a language-independent method for syllable segmentation. The method is based on the Sonority Sequencing Principle, by which the sonority inside a syllable increases from its boundaries towards the syllabic nucleus. The sonority function employed was derived from the posterior probabilities of a broad phonetic class recognizer, trained with data coming from an open-sourc...

We demonstrate that adult English speakers make use of perceptual principles in medial consonant cluster deletion. Cross-linguistically, consonant cluster simplification via deletion is more likely apply to the first consonant rather than the second consonant (if both consonants are of equal sonority). Adult native English speakers, were given a two-alternative forced-choice task in which eithe...

This study investigated whether L2 phonological learning can be characterized as a gradual and systematically patterned replacement of non-native segments by native segments in learners’ speech, conforming to a two-stage implicational scale. The study adopted a dynamic approach to language variation based on Gatbonton’s (1978) gradual diffusion framework. Participants were 40 Québec Francophone...

In their article ‘What we know about what we have never heard: Evidence from perceptual illusions’, Berent, Steriade, Lennertz, and Vaknin (2007) address the question of whether listeners have innate knowledge of phonological markedness. Focusing on sonority and syllable structure, they answer this question positively. SpeciWcally, they argue that English listeners’ perception of onset clusters...

We investigated the alignment of F0 peaks in disyllabic target words in polar questions and contrastive statements in Tashlhiyt Berber, concentrating on cases where both syllables contained a sonorant nucleus. Peak location, interpreted as H tone association, is not only determined by the communicative function of the utterance, but also by sonority and syllable weight, with a preference for mo...