Previous research has found that different syllabic (particularly simplex vs. complex onset) organisations have different temporal stability signatures in articulations – this observation is based entirely on articulatory measurements. In this article, we present the results of three production experiments which show that similar correlations between onset organisation and temporal stability metrics are observable in an analysis of acoustic measurements in American English and Jazani Arabic. The results that we present show stability across speakers and test items for both language groups, and highlight the possibility of using acoustic techniques to help to investigate the organisation of onsets in other languages.

This paper presents the results of a corpus study and an online loanword adaptation experiment examining the tonal adaptation of English loanwords in Mandarin. Using maximum entropy models, I control for the substantial influences of lexical tone distributions and standardisation, and uncover phonological determinants of tone beyond these lexical and conventional factors. The most important phonological determinant of tone in the corpus was English voicing, while in the experiment it was English stress-aligned pitch contours. I argue that these distinct tonal adaptation patterns constitute two different perceptual mappings, one from F0 perturbations to tone and the other from English intonation to tone, both arising due to particular borrowing contexts. I suggest that increasingly close contact between English and Mandarin may lead to more intonation-driven tonal adaptation in the latest wave of borrowing. The maximum entropy approach holds promise for the analysis of complex cases of tonal adaptation in other languages.

This paper investigates the nature of native Mandarin Chinese speakers’ phonotactic knowledge via an experimental study and formal modelling of the experimental results. Results from a phonological well-formedness judgement experiment suggest that Mandarin speakers’ phonotactic knowledge is sensitive not only to lexical statistics, but also to grammatical principles such as systematic and accidental phonotactic constraints, allophonic restrictions and segment–tone co-occurrence restrictions. We employ the UCLA Phonotactic Learner to model Mandarin speakers’ phonotactic knowledge, and compare the model's well-formedness predictions with speakers’ judgements. The disparity between the model's predictions and the well-formedness ratings from the experiment indicates that grammatical principles and the lexicon are still not sufficient to explain all of the variations in the speakers’ judgements. We argue that multiple biases, such as naturalness bias, allophony bias and suprasegmental bias, are effective during phonotactic learning.

The mismatching of morphosyntactic and phonological domains inside words provides a testing ground for models of the morphosyntax–phonology interface. This paper describes a pattern of morphosyntax–phonology mismatches in Muskogee. Muskogee verbs are spelled out at two phases, vP and CP, resulting in two phonological domains, which this paper models as ω-recursion. The vP phase and ωmin are mismatched: either vP-phase material is parsed outside ωmin – an undermatch – or CP-phase material is parsed inside ωmin – an overmatch. The mismatch pattern requires a parallel model of morphosyntax–phonology mapping to distinguish mismatches using gradient Align constraints, rather than categorial Match constraints. Additionally, a phase-based model must allow earlier cycles to be altered in later cycles, ruling out strict phase inalterability in phonology, while a Stratal OT analysis must send a word's first phase through the stem-level phonology, regardless of its ultimate phasal structure.

In this paper, I develop an analysis of the Italian syntax–prosody interface in Match Theory, revisiting three φ-diagnostics from previous work: word-final vowel deletion, stress retraction and final lengthening. I show that these processes sometimes diverge in their distribution, supporting the existence of two phrasal domains in Italian. These domains are analysed using prosodic recursion. I then develop a novel formulation of MatchXP, according to which only syntactic XPs with phonologically overt heads, whether lexical or functional, are visible to the syntax–prosody mapping. This formulation is argued to be superior to versions of MatchXP that only match lexical XPs or that attempt to match all XPs, at least in Italian, suggesting that implementation of syntax–prosody mapping constraints may be subject to cross-linguistic variation.