In this paper we show how Jessen & Ringen's (2002) analysis of voicing in German stops can be extended to account for the voicing of German fricatives. It is argued that while stops in German contrast for the feature [spread glottis], fricatives contrast for [voice] (and [spread glottis]). Our analysis, which involves presonorant faithfulness, is compared to an analysis with coda devoicing. We show that the two analyses make crucially different predictions, and present experimental evidence in support of the presonorant faithfulness analysis. The experimental results show considerable variation, which can be accommodated in our OT analysis.

This article re-examines ‘conflicting directionality’ in Japanese mimetic words, a distributional pattern in which palatalisation is preferentially realised on the rightmost of two coronal consonants, but on the leftmost consonant in a word without coronals. Analysis of the original dictionary evidence given in support of this generalisation and an exhaustive search of the Japanese mimetic stratum reveal both several counterexamples to conflicting directionality and the fact that the datasets are far too small to support linguistic generalisation. The theoretical assumptions employed to account for Japanese mimetic palatalisation are thus re-examined, with a focus on clarifying the predictions for future valid examples of conflicting directionality.

For any phonotactic restriction on syllable onsets and codas, it can be shown that parallel restrictions are attested at edges of each higher prosodic domain. Onsets can be required at the beginnings of syllables, words or utterances, codas can be banned at the ends of any of these constituents and so on. This paper argues that these restrictions follow from constraint schemata: any markedness constraint on syllable onsets or codas (MOns or MCoda) is part of a family of constraints (MOns(Ons/PCat) or MCoda(Coda/PCat)) which imposes parallel restrictions on initial onsets or final codas of each prosodic domain. These prosodic domain-edge markedness constraints can induce epenthesis, deletion or other segmental changes at domain edges; they can also shape the prosodic structure of words.

Phonological judgements are often gradient: blick>?bwick>*bnick>**bzick. The mechanisms behind gradient generalisation remain controversial, however. This paper tests the role of phonological features in helping speakers evaluate which novel combinations receive greater lexical support. A model is proposed in which the acceptability of a string is based on the most probable combination of natural classes that it instantiates. The model is tested on its ability to predict acceptability ratings of nonce words, and its predictions are compared against those of models that lack features or economise on feature specifications. The proposed model achieves the best balance of performance on attested and unattested sequences, and is a significant predictor of acceptability even after the other models are factored out. The feature-based model's predictions do not completely subsume those of simpler models, however. This may indicate multiple levels of evaluation, involving segment-based phonotactic probability and feature-based gradient phonological grammaticality.

Recent work in metrical typology within Optimality Theory has emphasised the rhythmic distribution of stress peaks by reference to clashes and lapses, compared to the more central role of foot constituency characteristic of most previous approaches. One consequence of this emphasis has been the introduction of constraints that require reference to non-adjacent objects in the representation, such as two unstressed syllables plus a word edge or a stress peak. I argue here for a constraint-based approach to metrical typology that permits only strictly local formulations. This approach requires increased reference to foot structure, while maintaining local reference to clashes and lapses. The revised set of constraints predicts a larger set of possible stress systems, but correctly includes an attested iambic pattern excluded by recent theories.

Productive palatalisation is a striking property of Japanese mimetic items. The docking site of the [−anterior] feature is contingent on consonantal place, and rhotics resist palatalisation. Cross-linguistically, consonantal places differ in palatalisability, and palatalised apical rhotics are not preferred. Bringing together the cross-linguistic insights offered by Rose (1997b) and Hall (2000), I offer a new account of Japanese mimetic palatalisation, which crucially appeals to the notion of feature compatibility. The proposed analysis is attractive for two reasons. First, feature compatibility is firmly grounded in robust cross-linguistic tendencies. Second, the analysis covers a much wider range of data than that proposed by Zoll (1996, 1997), which is based on constituent-initial licensing of complex segments. The analysis defended in the present work is thus desirable both cross-linguistically and empirically.

The intonation of Greek wh-questions consists of a rise-fall followed by a low plateau and a final rise. Using acoustic data, we show (i) that the exact contour shape depends on the length of the question, and (ii) that the position of the first peak and the low plateau depends on the position of the stressed syllables, and shows predictable adjustments in alignment, depending on the proximity of adjacent tonal targets. Models that specify the F0 of all syllables, or models that specify F0 by superposing contour shapes for shorter and longer domains, cannot account for such fine-grained lawful variation except by using ad hoc tonal specifications, which, in turn, do not allow for phonological generalisations about contours applying to utterances of greatly different lengths. In contrast, our findings follow easily from an autosegmental-metrical approach to intonational phonology, according to which melodies may contain long F0 stretches derived by interpolation between specified targets associated with metrically strong syllables and prosodic boundaries.

This paper presents a previously unnoticed universal property of stress patterns in the world's languages: they are, for small neighbourhoods, neighbourhood-distinct. Neighbourhood-distinctness is a locality condition defined in automata-theoretic terms. This universal is established by examining stress patterns contained in two typological studies. Strikingly, many logically possible – but unattested – patterns do not have this property. Not only does neighbourhood-distinctness unite the attested patterns in a non-trivial way, it also naturally provides an inductive principle allowing learners to generalise from limited data. A learning algorithm is presented which generalises by failing to distinguish same-neighbourhood environments perceived in the learner's linguistic input – hence learning neighbourhood-distinct patterns – as well as almost every stress pattern in the typology. In this way, this work lends support to the idea that properties of the learner can explain certain properties of the attested typology, an idea not straightforwardly available in optimality-theoretic and Principle and Parameter frameworks.

This study investigates whether differences (a) in word-internal morphological structure and (b) in lexical stress patterns are reflected in prosodic constituent structure, by examining duration measurements in Scottish English. In Experiments 1 and 2, at a slow speech rate, stem-final rhymes followed by Level II suffixes were on average 4–6% longer than corresponding strings in monomorphemic words, and 7–8% longer than stem-final rhymes followed by Level I suffixes. These results are consistent with the view that stems preceding Level II suffixes are mapped onto prosodic words in the prosodic representation. Experiment 3 obtained no reliable durational differences, even at a slow speech rate, between the initial syllable rhymes of SS words and SW words, which does not provide evidence for the hypothesis that these different stress patterns are represented as differences in foot structure.

Optimality Theory explains typological markedness implications by proposing that all speakers possess universal constraints penalising marked structures, irrespective of the evidence provided by their language (Prince & Smolensky 2004). The account of phonological perception sketched here entails that markedness constraints reveal their presence by inducing perceptual ‘repairs’ to structures ungrammatical in the hearer's language. As onset clusters of falling sonority are typologically marked relative to those of rising sonority (Greenberg 1978), we examine English speakers' perception of nasal-initial clusters, which are lacking in English. We find greater accuracy for rising-sonority clusters, evidencing knowledge of markedness constraints favouring such onset clusters. The misperception of sonority falls cannot be accounted for by stimulus artefacts (the materials are perceived accurately by speakers of Russian, a language allowing nasal-initial clusters) nor by phonetic failure (English speakers misperceive falls even with printed materials) nor by putative relations of such onsets to the statistics of the English lexicon.

Morphological concatenation often triggers phonological processes. For instance, addition of the plural suffix /-ən/ to Dutch nouns causes vowel lengthening in some nouns due to the stress-to-weight principle ([xɑt] vs. [ˈxaː.tən] ‘hole’). These kinds of processes often apply only to a subset of words – not all Dutch nouns undergo this process ([kɑt] vs. [ˈkɑ.tən] ‘cat’). Nouns need to be lexically indexed as either undergoing this process or not. I investigate how phonological grammar and lexical indexation are learned when learners are confronted with data like these. Based on learnability considerations, I hypothesise that learners acquire a grammar with default non-alternation, so that novel items are treated as non-alternating. I report the results of artificial language learning experiments compatible with this hypothesis, and model these results in a version of the Biased Constraint Demotion algorithm (Prince & Tesar 2004).

Phonological grammars characterise distinctions between relatively well-formed (unmarked) and relatively ill-formed (marked) phonological structures. We review evidence that markedness influences speech-error probabilities. Specifically, although errors result in unmarked as well as marked structures, there is a markedness asymmetry: errors are more likely to produce unmarked outcomes. We show that stochastic disruption to the computational mechanisms realising a Harmonic Grammar (HG) can account for the broad empirical patterns of speech errors. We demonstrate that our proposal can account for the general markedness asymmetry. We also develop methods for linking particular HG proposals to speech-error distributions, and illustrate these methods using a simple HG and a set of initial consonant errors in English.

Competing proposals on the syllabification of initial consonants in Moroccan Arabic are evaluated using a combination of experimental and modelling techniques. The proposed model interprets an input syllable structure as a set of articulatory landmarks coordinated in time. This enables the simulation of temporal patterns associated with the input syllable structure under different noise conditions. Patterns of stability between landmarks simulated by the model are matched to patterns in data collected with Electromagnetic Articulometry experiments. The results implicate a heterosyllabic parse of initial clusters so that strings like /sbu/ comprise two syllables, [s.bu]. Beyond this specific result for Moroccan Arabic, the model reveals the range of validity of certain stability-based indexes of syllable structure and generates predictions that allow evaluation of a syllabic parse even when stability-based heuristics break down. Overall, the paper provides support for the broad hypothesis that syllable structure is reflected in patterns of temporal stability and contributes analytical tools to evaluate competing theories on the basis of these patterns.