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...

Combinations of segments in a language are subject to co-occurrence restrictions. This paper focuses on phonotactic constraints that govern the formation of word-initial consonant clusters in German. A description of the inventory of clusters results in scales of phonotactic preferability and a novel approach to a ranking of onset clusters. A set of structural preferences for clusters can be es...

This single-subject case study evaluates effects of treatment of a complex onset on the sound system of a monolingual Spanish-speaking child (female, aged 3;9) with phonological delay. Pre-treatment, the child excluded all consonant+liquid clusters, as well as tap /[symbol: see text]/ and trill /r/. Immediately following training on /f[symbol: see text]-/ in non-words, the child generalized acr...

In this article we present evidence from several languages that rhotic plus high front vocoid sequences (e.g. /rj ri/ or the reverse /jr ir/) exhibit various avoidance strategies; e.g. either the /r/ or the vocoid changes into some other sound or deletes, or these sequences simply do not occur. We demonstrate that the avoidance of such sequences does not always follow from more general co-occur...

Prosodic Weight* Draga Zec Cornell University Introduction Syllable weight has been standardly characterized in terms of subsyllabic constituency, and computed by making reference to mora count, as argued in Hyman 1984, McCarthy and Prince 1986 and Hayes 1989, among others.1 Certain recent proposals, however, posit additional syllable weight distinctions, based on the sonority of the nucleus (e...