Sonority is generally considered to play a primary role in governing intrasyllabic phonotactics. In this chapter, we examine the phonotactic and articulatory properties of tautosyllabic vowel-liquid sequences in American English, and consider the implications for theories of sonority. Constraints on the distribution of vowels preceding liquid codas were first examined through lexical corpus ana...

This paper will describe typologically unusual onset clusters in Choapan Zapotec, an Oto-Manguean language spoken in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Mexico. Onset clusters in Choapan Zapotec (CHO) violate sonority sequencing principles (SSP) in theoretically problematic ways; prohibitions in CHO against almost all types of coda consonants combine with these facts to create even more problems for cu...

All spoken languages encode syllables and constrain their internal structure. But whether these restrictions concern the design of the language system, broadly, or speech, specifically, remains unknown. To address this question, here, we gauge the structure of signed syllables in American Sign Language (ASL). Like spoken languages, signed syllables must exhibit a single sonority/energy peak (i....

Syllable contact pairs cross-linguistically tend to have a falling sonority slope, a constraint which is called the Syllable Contact Law (SCL). In this study, the phonotactics of syllable contacts in 4202 CVC.CVC words of Persian lexicon is investigated. The consonants of Persian were divided into five sonority categories and the frequency of all possible sonority slopes is computed both in lex...

In this paper we consider a widely attested process: sonority substitutions whereby sounds of a certain sonority class change into sounds of another sonority class. These sonority substitutions concern, for example, liquids (/l,r/) changing into glides (/j,w/). The target word groen ‘green’ may be realized by an aphasic speaker as [xjUn] or [xwUn]. We will discuss these sonority substitutions i...

Optimality Theory explains typological markedness implications by proposing that all speakers possess universal constraints penalizing marked structure, irrespective of the evidence provided by their language (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004). An account of phonological perception sketched here entails that markedness constraints reveal their presence by inducing perceptual 'repairs' to structure...