The present study investigates non-local temporal adjustments before an upcoming length contrast in Italian minimal pairs that differ only in the length of the medial consonant (e.g., geminate word palla "ball" vs singleton word pala "shovel"). This contrast is reportedly signaled by the duration of the singleton/geminate consonant and of the preceding vowel. Here, it is shown that the duration...

Two phoneme monitoring experiments examined the influence of Transitional Probability (TP) on phoneme recognition. Target phonemes appeared at the end of Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) syllables, or as the first element of coda clusters in CVCC syllables. Reliable TP effects were found only for targets in CVCC syllables. The TPs both into and out of the targets influenced listeners' ability to...

This paper aims to examine how the consonant clusters and illicit codas are modified in Mandarin loanwords transliterated from English, and to argue that no rules need to be involved and that a purely constraint-based approach—within the framework of Optimality Theory—can explain the data. The data collected from transliterated American state names and state names display the onset-coda inconsi...

Ultrasound can be used to address unresolved questions in phonological theory. To date, some studies have shown that results from ultrasound imaging can shed light on how differences in phonological elements are implemented. Phenomena that have been investigated include transitional schwa, vowel coalescence, and transparent vowels. A study of consonant cluster phonotactics is presented as an ex...

We investigated articulatory movements of native Japanese speakers’ productions of non-native consonant clusters, using the WAVE system (NDI Corp.). Four Japanese male speakers pronounced “blat”, “bnat”, “btat”, and “pnat” 10 times each in a carrier sentence. Tongue tip displacement from the first to the second consonant varied greatly among the speakers. An ANOVA with two factors, Speaker and ...

This research examined acoustic-phonetic cues to word boundary location in French consonant clusters, and assessed their use in on-line lexical segmentation. Two word-spotting experiments manipulated the alignment between word targets and syllable boundaries. A perceptual cost of such misalignment was observed for obstruent-liquid clusters but not for /s/ + obstruent clusters. For the former cl...

The duration of speech segments as a function of position in utterances (initial, roedial, final) was studicd. In the first cxpedment seven Engl/sh speakers read nonsense utterances of the form "say a [bab], say a [bgbab], say a [babgb]," etc. Spectragrams were used to determine the duration of speech segments in the readings. Final syllables were found to be longer than nonfinal syllables. F/h...

PURPOSE This study aimed to compare sound production errors arising due to phonological processing impairment with errors arising due to motor speech impairment. METHOD Two speakers with similar clinical profiles who produced similar consonant cluster simplification errors were examined using a repetition task. We compared both overall accuracy and acoustic details of hundreds of productions ...

A review of phonological syllabification theory reveals considerable controversy, with a number of conflicting theories put forward to explain this process. In this study the performance of five, French specific, syllabification procedures were compared and contrasted both against each other, using lexical analysis, and against human syllable boundary placement, using a metalinguistic syllable ...

This study systematically investigates the temporal organization of American English onset and coda consonant clusters on the basis of kinematic data. Results from seven speakers suggest that consonants in complex onsets are organized globally with respect to the following vowel, while consonants in complex codas are organized locally relative to the preceding vowel. These results support the c...