The paper is an in-depth study of how the principles and rules of the metrical theory of phonology have found their way to apply to Iraqi Arabic words and expressions. Iraqi lexical items have amassed evidence illustrating that both foot and stress are the hub of phonological designs of parametric prominence entailed in mapping and building up…

Research has shown that contoids (phonetically defined consonants) may provide more robust and reliable cues to syllable and word boundaries than vocoids (phonetically defined vowels). Recent studies of Danish, a language characterized by frequent long sequences of vocoids in speech, have suggested that the reduced occurrence of contoids may make…

Cross-linguistically, languages allow a wider variety of phonotactic patterns in onsets than in codas. However, the variability of phonotactic patterns in coda position in different languages suggests these patterns must, at least in part, be learned. Two experiments were conducted to explore whether there is an asymmetry in English-learning…

Many languages have processes which lengthen or shorten a vowel or consonant. In this dissertation, I concentrate on Open Syllable Lengthening, Closed Syllable Shortening, Monosyllabic Lengthening and Trochaic Lengthening, and present a formal model which captures these lengthenings and shortening as the insertion, deletion or reassignment of a…

Much of what we know about the development of listeners' word segmentation strategies originates from the artificial language-learning literature. However, many artificial speech streams designed to study word segmentation lack a salient cue found in all natural languages: utterance boundaries. In this study, participants listened to a…

This study investigates whether a natural order exists for non-native acquisition in the production of English syllable coda obstruents by Korean and Chinese adult native speakers. We recorded L2 English monosyllabic words produced by 66 Chinese and 51 Korean native speakers. The recorded speech was then evaluated by 11 native-speaker listeners of…

This paper investigates epenthesis process in Persian to catch some results in relating to vowel and consonant insertion in Persian lexicon. This survey has a close relationship to the description of epenthetic consonants and the conditions in which these consonants are used. Since no word in Persian may begin with a vowel, so that hiatus can't be…

This dissertation describes the segments and tones of Soyaltepec Mazatec, an Oto-Manguean language of southern Mexico virtually undescribed in the literature with the exception of Pike (1956). The preliminary work done by Pike and subsequent analyses by Goldsmith (1990) and Pizer (1994) are reviewed giving evidence that the system is complex and…

The present study is a grammatical overview of the Bao'an Tu language (one of the varieties included in the designation "ISO6393-3:PEH", also known as "Tongren Monguor", "Southwestern Monguor", or "Tongren Tu"). Bao'an Tu is spoken by approximately 4,000 people who live on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau in…

The relationship between perception and production remains an unresolved issue within the study of phonological acquisition. Recent developments in optimality theory offer potentially new solutions to this long-standing problem; but thus far, the proposals that have been advanced are in the absence of actual perception-production data from a given…

This study examined the effect of lexical aspect and phonology on regular past-tense production. Data are presented from a group of 31 children, mean age 33 months, with typical language development. A case study of a 50-month-old child with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is also presented. Children imitated sentence pairs that included an…

It is generally agreed among French linguists that the word has no phonetic or phonological status in French. This position reflects mostly pedagogical considerations and preoccupation with surface phonetic facts and demarcative signals. Investigation of processes of a more abstract nature reveals, however, that a certain number of rules…

In polysyllabic segments, the composition of medial clusters is a reflection of morpheme structure constraints as they apply to initial and final groups of syllables. Also, medial clusters ideally overlap, i.e., have simultaneous membership in both the preceding and following syllable segments. (DB)

French linguists generally agree that the word in French has no phonetic or phonological status. This article examines this position and studies several vowel-consonant sequences, mute-"e" deletion and post-consonantal deletion and suggests that the role of French word-boundaries is more important than is generally acknowledged. (CHK)

Revised version of a paper presented at the 1971 summer meeting of the Linguistic Society of America at Buffalo, New York. Research supported in part by a National Science Foundation grant made to the Phonology Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley. (VM)