The paper presents the results of a complex study of ?onsonantal phonemes' syntagmatics, registered at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the word throughout the historical development of the English language. The analysis of frequencies of consonantal clusters' actualization allowed the author to characterize the regularities of their…

This study is concerned with comparing the pronunciation in Southern Welsh, a Celtic language, and Cockney, an English dialect, regarding the place of articulation. The study uses a comparative method to shed light on the similarities and differences between the two accents. The data were collected from YouTube videos of speakers of Southern Welsh…

This dissertation presents three studies that examined issues related to the production and the perception of pitch in a tone language. The first study examined linguistic contexts that may modulate consonant-induced pitch perturbations (CF0) in a tone language. Previous studies have produced mixed findings regarding the role of linguistic…

Palatalization refers to a type of coarticulation in which the place of articulation of some sound is closer to the palate than otherwise expected, very often triggered by adjacent palatal segments. It has been known as one of the most dynamic phonological phenomena in phonetic and phonological research, but the articulatory nature of…

Many English-speaking children use plural nominal forms in spontaneous speech before the age of two, and display some understanding of plural inflection in production tasks. However, results from an intermodal preferential study suggested a lack of "comprehension" of nominal plural morphology at 24 months of age (Kouider, Halberda, Wood,…

This dissertation explores the phonetic mechanisms of the sound change known as rhotacism (/s/ greater than /z/ greater than /r/) which is observed in Italic, Germanic, and Sanskrit, among other languages, employing lab-based methods of "experimental historical phonology" (Ohala 1974), and approaching sound change from the theoretical standpoint…

Debuccalization is a weakening phenomenon whereby various consonants reduce to laryngeals. Examples include Spanish s-aspiration (s becomes h word-finally) and English t-glottalization (t becomes glottal stop syllable-finally). Previous analyses of debuccalization view it as a lenition process that deletes or manipulates formal phonological…

Two member onset consonant clusters with /s/ as the first member (#sC onsets) behave differently from other double onset consonant clusters in English. Phonological explanations of children's consonant cluster production have been posited to predict children's speech acquisition. The aim of this study was to consider the role of the Sonority…

Consonant mastery is one of the most widely used metrics of typical phonological acquisition and of phonological disorder. Two fundamental methodological questions concerning research on consonant acquisition are (1) how to elicit a representative sample of productions and (2) how to analyse this sample once it has been collected. This paper…

This study investigated the acquisition of word initial s clusters of 3-5 year old Dutch children with phonological disorders. Within these clusters, sl was produced correctly most often, whereas sn and sx were the more difficult clusters. In cluster reductions, s+obstruent and sl clusters reduction patterns followed the Sonority Sequencing…

A study investigated the nature of clear and dark sounds (resonance) in English, focusing on the features associated with the lateral consonant /l/. Subjects were three male undergraduate students and one male university faculty member, all native speakers of different English varieties. Each subject read aloud 27 short phrases or sentences. Using…

Allophonic variations in the quality and voicelessness of British English Received Pronunciation /1/ were investigated, largely through their acoustic correlates as revealed by spectrography. (Author/RM)

Productions of /s/ and /z/ by ten adult speakers were investigated using the electropalatograph (EPG). The participants, ten speech researchers who spoke English as their first language, recorded productions of /s/ and /z/ in nonsense and real words. The maximum contact frame was used as the point of reference to compare tongue/palate contact for…

In this study we use a computational model of language learning called model of syntax acquisition in children (MOSAIC) to investigate the extent to which the optional infinitive (OI) phenomenon in Dutch and English can be explained in terms of a resource-limited distributional analysis of Dutch and English child-directed speech. The results show…

A core area of phonology is the study of phonotactics, or how sounds are linearly combined. Recent cross-linguistic analyses have shown that the phonology determines not only phonotactics but also the articulatory coordination or timing of adjacent sounds. In this article, I explore how the relation between coordination and phonotactics affects…