Syllable structure is systematically related to tone patterning in two dimensions: sonority and duration. The reasons for this are fundamentally phonetic: syllable weight is determined by the sonority and duration profile of the rhyme, which themselves are the phonetic correlates of tone. This paper uses the Moraic Model [1] to analyze the weight-mediated syllable-tone patterning in four distin...

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 aims to investigate whether--and how--consonant sonority (obstruent vs. sonorant) and status (coda vs. onset) within syllable boundaries modulate the syllable-based segmentation strategies. Here, it is questioned whether French dyslexic children, who experience acoustic-phonetic (i.e., voicing) and phonological impairments, are sensitive to an optimal 'sonorant coda-obstruent onset' ...

This paper examines the two sandhi patterns of disyllabic compound whose initial tone is either a high falling tone (T3) or a dipping tone (T5) in Suzhou in the framework of Optimality Theory. The idea of different levels of tone melody in (Shih, 1986) is adopted in this paper. Namely, the syllable level tone melody changes to word level which lead to the neutralization of T3 and T5 sandhi. Lef...

We describe a computer-assisted procedure for composing harmonic progressions that takes into account the perceptual processes underlying roughness (sensory dissonance) and the pitch of complex tones. First, the user specifies the outer voices and specific model parameters, including preferred values of the perceived roughness of each sonority, the pitch commonality of successive sonorities, an...

Many studies focused on the importance of statistical and distributional properties to account for the prelexical and segmental role of syllable-sized units in silent reading in French. We explored how skilled readers segmented printed (pseudo)words when no reliable statistical cues were available around and within the syllable boundary. We were interested in how sonority, a universal phonologi...

Treiman (1983) and others have argued that spoken syllables are best characterized not as linear strings of phonemes, but as hierarchically organized units consisting of an onset (initial consonant or consonant cluster) and a rime (the vowel and any following consonants) and that the rime is further divided into a peak or nucleus (the vowel) and a coda (the final consonants). It has also been a...