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....

The structural elements of the prosodic hierarchy and the ways in which phonological generalisations make reference to them are investigated. Assuming, as argued, that these elements constitute a universal set of primitives, the different types (categories) of such elements, especially the syllable, are examined more closely. Specifically, the traditional weight dichotomy of ‘heavy’ vs. ‘light’...

Speakers communicate pragmatic and discourse meaning through the prosodic form assigned to an utterance, and listeners must attend to the acoustic cues to prosodic form to fully recover the speaker’s intended meaning. While much of the research on prosody examines supra-segmental cues such as F0 and temporal patterns, prosody is also known to affect the phonetic properties of segments as well. ...

Vowel onset point (VOP) refers to the starting event of a vowel, that may be reflected in different aspects of the speech signal. The major issue in VOP detection using existing methods is the confusion among the vowels and other categories of sounds preceding them. This work explores the usefulness of sonority information to reduce this confusion and improve VOP detection. Vowels are the most ...

According to previous investigations of gestural patterning, consonant gestures exhibit less temporal overlap in a syllable/word onset than in a coda or across syllables. Additionally, front-to-back order of place of articulation in stop-stop sequences (labial-coronal, coronal-dorsal, labial-dorsal) exhibits more overlap than the opposite order. One possible account for these differences is tha...

ABSRACT: Phoneme inventories of the world’s languages as depicted by the UPSID database (Maddieson and Precoda 1990) are analyzed using multivariate statistical techniques of principal components analysis and k-means and hierarchical clustering. The first two meaningful principal components, representing dimensions that account for the most variance in sound systems but are not caused by differ...