This dissertation examines the relative effects of phonetic salience and phonological prominence on speech sound processing. Three test cases, respectively, investigate the processing of consonants versus vowels by speakers of German, Hebrew, and Amharic; the processing of aspirated versus unaspirated stops by speaker of Spanish and Thai; and the…

This thesis presents a comprehensive phonological analysis of the Weledeh dialect of Dogrib, a Northern Athabaskan language spoken in the Northwest Territories, Canada, based on the author's own fieldwork. The phonology of Northern Athabaskan languages, and Dogrib in particular, has to date been regarded as highly irregular, and subject to…

The Tlingit language, indigenous to Southeast Alaska and neighboring parts of British Columbia and the Yukon territory, is related to the Athabascan languages and the recently extinct language Eyak. Like Athabascan and Eyak, Tlingit verbal morphology is highly complex. The conjugation of Tlingit verbs is unpredictable in certain respects, making…