The traditional division of the Chinese syllable into initial, final, and tone is examined. Distributional criteria are used to justify this analysis as more applicable to the Cantonese syllable than strict segmental analysis. A detailed analysis of the Cantonese final is given and implications for cross-language analyses are discussed. (CHK)

Argues that there is phonological gemination in English based on distribution of vowel qualities in medial and final syllables. The analysis, cast in terms of optimality theory, has implications in several domains: (1) ambisyllabicity is not the right way to capture aspiration and flapping; (2) languages in which stress depends on vowel quality…

Combinational characterization and statistical and computational techniques for generalizing rule analysis to the inference of rule order are applied to the problems of the reduction of the syllable-final consonants s, n, and r in Caribbean Spanish. Results show that aspiration and deletion can be seen as intrinsically ordered in both s and r…

Identification of place of articulation in synthesized syllables was examined with eight normal hearing adults listening in quiet or noise and three adults with high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss. Stimuli with an appropriate second formant (F2) transition were compared with stimuli in which F2 was constant. (Author/DB)

Sound/syllable repetitions of 13 young children who stutter were acoustically analyzed to identify differences in second formant (F2) transitions between the stuttered and nonstuttered portions of the words. Findings indicated no significant differences in the frequency of occurrence of missing or atypical F2 transitions for young children at…

Recent accounts of the pathomechanism underlying apraxia of speech (AOS) were based on the speech production model of Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer, and Meyer (1999)1999. The apraxic impairment was localized to the phonetic encoding level where the model postulates a mental store of motor programs for high-frequency syllables. Varley and Whiteside…

A study of consonant-vowel linkages focused on the nature of the vowel boundaries with onset and codas. Subjects judged the status of various word pairs as possible exemplars of a particular manipulation they had been taught to listen for in model nonsense words. The models were of three distinct tasks: (1) a nucleus substitution task, to replace…

Electromyographic experiments were performed indicating that durational differences between vowels that precede voiced consonants and those that precede voiceless ones are due to a sustention of muscular activity in articulation, which occurs only with vowels preceding voiced consonants. (SC)

A sentence-reading procedure was used to study the influence of syntactic structure on the timing of syllables in speech production. The study was designed to test whether syllable lengthening might be sensitive to the distinction between surface and underlying structure. (Author/RM)

A procedure is presented for teaching unintelligible children to achieve syllable closure and improve syllable shape through the use of chaining. Chaining can simultaneously teach consonants in pre, post, and intervocalic contexts using functional phrase combinations. A case study of a five-year-old boy treated in kindergarten is included.…

A diary study of the speech of a child acquiring English found eight between-word processes, all of which were optional and occurred in fairly restricted environments. Most of the processes were also of short duration. (Author/CB)

Research supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. (DD)

Revised version of lectures given at the University of Maryland, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Illinois. Bibliography included. (VM)

The role of a strategy of reduplication in phonological acquisition and behavior was examined in terms of: (1) the relationship between adoption of this strategy and failure to produce nonreduplicated multisyllabic forms and final consonants, and (2) the role of reduplication in production constraints. (Author/AM)

Both Italian and English have four degrees of stress: emphatic, main, secondary and weak. This paper outlines some similarities, then reviews differences between the languages that can cause difficulties in learning the second language. (CHK)