This paper pursues a novel analysis of Mandarin rhotacization using Sonority Scale and characterizes this phonological process computationally with BOOLEAN MONADIC RECURSIVE SCHEMES (BMRSs, Chandlee & Jardine 2021). shows an asymmetry between high front vowels (i.e. [i, y] back [u] vowels. Diverging from previous phonetics-based accounts to explain (Chao 1968; Duanmu 2007; a. o.), I propose...

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...

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 ...

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...