Ternary or three-level vowel length is typologically rare, and supporting evidence is limited. This paper presents the results of an investigation into the hypothesised case of this configuration in Shilluk. We first describe the role of vowel length in Shilluk phonology and morphology, and then report on an acoustic study in which minimal sets for vowel length (short, long, overlong) are measured for vowel duration, coda duration, vowel quality and fundamental frequency. Short, long and overlong vowels differ significantly and substantially in terms of vowel duration: 96% of the items can be classified successfully for vowel length on the basis of this measurement alone. Of the other measurements, only vowel quality is significant, and this effect is considerably smaller. The mean values for vowel duration – 68, 111 and 150 ms for short, long and overlong vowels respectively – are similar to those reported for ternary vowel length in Dinka.

This paper re-examines theoretical constructs used in the analysis of Russian word stress, employing data from speakers with acquired surface dyslexia, a symptom which is characterised by impaired lexical access and preserved grapheme–phoneme correspondence rules. Russian stems have been traditionally analysed as lexically accented or unaccented, with a default rule deriving surface stress in the latter case. In the study reported here, we found no differences in the production of accented and unaccented stems. Instead, the analysis of errors revealed that the significant factors determining stress placement include stress neighbourhood and stress position. The speakers produced fewer errors in consistently spelled words, and there was a strong tendency to shift stress to the final syllable in consonant-final words, and to the penultimate syllable in vowel-final words. These results indicate that distributional properties play an important role in stress assignment in both accented and unaccented stem types.

This article investigates the process of o-fronting in Ukrainian and claims that it should be analysed as an effect of PAL-e, a constraint mandating that the consonant and the vowel agree in backness. The operation of PAL-e is opaque, due to the interaction with a depalatalisation process applying before [ε]. The analysis establishes four points of theoretical interest. First, from a typological perspective, PAL-e parallels PAL-i, postulated by Rubach (2000a) for Russian, which strengthens the contention that PAL constraints should be stated as agreement constraints that bring under the same denominator the palatalisation of consonants and the fronting of vowels. Second, the opacity of o-fronting cannot be analysed by appealing to MAX[F] constraints. Third, sympathy theory cannot handle the data either. Fourth, Optimality Theory must be modified to admit derivational levels.

After years of searching for evidence for the syllable in Gokana, I presented a possible argument in Hyman (2011) that the prosodic stem consists at most of two bimoraic syllables. In this note I show that there is an alternative account not involving syllables. Either way, Gokana makes very little reference to syllable structure, if at all.

It has been demonstrated that metaphony is triggered by underlying final /-i/ and /-u/. The important feature that unifies the two posttonic vowels, which are responsible for the tonic vowel alternations, is [+ high[. The spreading of this feature to the tonic vowel accounts for metaphony. Vocalisms defined without the feature [high], such as those of particle phonology and Goldsmith's model, fail to mirror the metaphony process.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on how much detail young children's word representations contain. We investigate early representations of place of articulation and voicing contrasts, inspired by previously attested asymmetrical patterns in children's early word productions. We tested Dutch-learning 20- and 24-month-olds’ perception of these fundamentally different contrasts in a mispronunciation-detection paradigm. Our results show that different kinds and directions of phonological changes yield different effects. Both 20- and 24-month-olds noticed coronal mispronunciations of labials, but not vice versa. The 24-month-olds noticed voiced mispronunciations of voiceless stops, but not vice versa, while the 20-month-olds failed to notice any voicing mispronunciations. We argue that early lexical representations are specified in very systematic ways, that not all phonological contrasts are encoded at the same time and that the phonological system of a language determines which contrasts are specified first in the representations of early words.

Two bodies of recent research from experimental psycholinguistics are summarised, each of which is centred upon a concept from phonology: LEXICAL STRESS and the SYLLABLE. The evidence indicates that neither construct plays a role in prelexical representations during speech recognition. Both constructs, however, are well supported by other performance evidence. Testing phonological claims against performance evidence from psycholinguistics can be difficult, since the results of studies designed to test processing models are often of limited relevance to phonological theory.

In de Chene & Anderson's (1979) article on compensatory lengthening, the authors make two strong claims as to the universal nature of compensatory lengthening. These claims are: (i) that compensatory lengthening occurs in two stages, involving the weakening of a consonant to a glide and the subsequent merger of the resulting diphthong; and (ii) that compensatory lengthening can only occur when there is a pre-existing vowel-length contrast in the language in question.

Both of these claims have received considerable attention in the literature. The first claim has never gained widespread acceptance, and has been challenged in several studies. Challenges have come from, for example, Hock (1986), Poser (1986), Sezer (1986) and more recently Gildea (1995). Each of these scholars provides a strong case against the view that compensatory lengthening is always decomposable into two distinct stages. The ensemble of their arguments renders this claim simply untenable.

Under the weak layering approach to prosodic structure (Itô & Mester 1992), the requirement that output forms be exhaustively parsed into binary feet, even when the input contains an odd-number of syllables, results in the odd-parity input problem, which consists of two sub-problems. The odd heavy problem is a pathological type of quantity-sensitivity where a single odd-numbered heavy syllable in an odd-parity output is parsed as a monosyllabic foot. The even output problem is the systematic conversion of odd-parity inputs to even-parity outputs. The article examines the typology of binary stress patterns predicted by two approaches, symmetrical alignment (McCarthy & Prince 1993) and iterative foot optimisation (Pruitt 2008, 2010), to demonstrate that the odd-parity input problem is pervasive in weak layering accounts. It then demonstrates that the odd-parity input problem can be avoided altogether under the alternative structural assumptions of weak bracketing (Hyde 2002).

According to many works on English phonology, word-final alveolar consonants – and only alveolar consonants – assimilate to following word-initial consonants, e.g. ran quickly → ra[ŋ] quickly. Some phonologists explain the readiness of alveolar consonants to assimilate (vs. the resistance of velar and labial articulations) by proposing that they have underspecified place of articulation (e.g. Avery & Rice 1989). Labial or dorsal nasals do not undergo assimilation because their place nodes are specified. There are reports that velar and labial consonants sometimes assimilate in English, but these are anecdotal observations, with no available audio and no statistics on their occurrence. We find evidence of assimilation of labial and velar nasals in the Audio British National Corpus, motivating a new, quantitative phonological framework: a statistical model of underspecification and variation which captures typical as well as less common but systematic patterns seen in non-coronal assimilation.

Sprung rhythm is a complex poetic metre invented and used by Gerard Manley Hopkins. We re-examine and amplify a seminal analysis of this metre by Kiparsky (1989). We coded the sprung rhythm corpus for stress, weight and phrasing, then used a computer program to locate every scansion compatible with Kiparsky's analysis. The analysis appears to be nearly exceptionless. However, it is incomplete in that it permits dozens or even hundreds of scansions for certain lines. We propose a Parsability Principle for metrics mandating that ambiguity of scansion be minimised, and suggest that under this proposal, the Kiparskyan system is not a possible metre. Our own revised analysis adds ten new constraints and is cast in the form of a stochastic maxent grammar. It produces an acceptably low level of ambiguity in metrical parsing, and is supported by a good match to the diacritics Hopkins employed to mark his intended scansion.

This paper presents a Maximum Entropy learner of grammars and lexicons (MaxLex), and demonstrates that MaxLex has an emergent preference for minimally abstract underlying representations. In order to keep the weight of faithfulness constraints low, the learner attempts to fill gaps in the lexical distribution of segments, making the underlying segment inventory more feature-economic. Even when the learner only has access to individual forms, properties of the entire system are implicitly available through the relative weighting of constraints. These properties lead to a preference for some abstract underlying representations over others, mitigating the computational difficulty of searching a large set of abstract forms. MaxLex is shown to be successful in learning certain abstract underlying forms through simulations based on the [i]~[Ø] alternation in Klamath verbs. The Klamath pattern cannot be represented or learned using concrete underlying representations, but MaxLex successfully learns both the phonotactic patterns and minimally abstract underlying representations.

The recent phonological literature has witnessed the emergence of a significant body of research under the rubric of underspecification theory. This model of inquiry was first proposed by Kiparsky (1982), developed more deeply in Archangeli (1984), and is articulated most exhaustively in Archangeli & Pulleyblank (forthcoming a). One of the most basic assumptions advanced in these works is that for each contrastive feature one value is specified underlyingly and the other is inserted by default. Feature changing harmony, which requires both values to be underlying, is a particularly interesting challenge to this claim and appears to undermine its restrictiveness. Indeed, it figures prominently in some recent proposals, such as Steriade (1987b), to justify relaxing the theory and admit both feature values at the underlying level.

Megan Crowhurst's ‘Diminutives and augmentatives in Mexican Spanish: a prosodic analysis’ (1992, henceforth CRO) takes a fresh look at the thorny problem of explicating the distribution of the allomorphs -itV and -(e)citV of the Spanish diminutive suffix. CRO has conspicuous virtues. Among them is the limitation of data to a single dialect, namely Sonoran, of northern Mexico. This narrow focus is insurance against inadvertently mixing incompatible data, a special risk posed by the considerable dialect variability of productive diminutivisation. At the same time, CRO broadens its data base by taking into account the partial parallelism between diminutive -itV/-(e)citV and augmentative -otV/-(e)sotV.

An ongoing debate in phonology concerns the treatment of cumulative constraint interactions, or ‘gang effects’, and by extension the question of which phonological frameworks are suitable models of the grammar. This paper uses a series of artificial grammar learning experiments to examine the inferences that learners draw about cumulative constraint violations in phonotactics in the absence of a confounding natural-language lexicon. I find that learners consistently infer linear counting and ganging cumulativity across a range of phonotactic violations.

This paper considers whether the phonology of the lexical pitch accent of Kyungsang Korean is being maintained by younger innovative speakers. We examine the pitch-accent patterns of nouns with various suffixes by comparing the speech of innovative Kyungsang speakers to that of older conservative speakers. It will be shown that while innovative speakers maintain the underlying distinction in the lexical pitch accent found with conservative speakers, the acoustic difference across the contrastive accent classes is substantially weaker in the speech of innovative speakers, for both noun stems and suffixes. Observation of individual differences in the phonetic realisation of the pitch accent and comparison with tonal patterns of Seoul Korean provide an insight into this sound change, offering evidence for how and why the acoustic distinction has weakened. This study thus documents a process of diachronic change in the prosody of Kyungsang Korean.

Kalam is a Trans New Guinea language of Papua New Guinea. Kalam has two distinct vowel types: full vowels /a e o/, which are of relatively long duration and stressed, and reduced central vowels, which are shorter and often unstressed, and occur predictably within word-internal consonant clusters and in monoconsonantal utterances. The predictable nature of the reduced vowels has led earlier researchers, e.g. Biggs (1963) and Pawley (1966), to suggest that they are a non-phonemic ‘consonant release’ feature, leading to lexical representations with long consonant strings and vowelless words. Here we compare Kalam to other languages with similar sound patterns and assess the implications for phonological theory in the context of Hall's (2006) typology of inserted vowels. We suggest that future work on predictable vowels should explore the extent to which clusters of properties are explained by evolutionary pathways.

The feature-economy principle is one of the key theoretical notions which have been postulated to account for the structure of phoneme inventories in the world's languages. In this paper, we test the explanatory power of this principle by conducting a study of the co-occurrence of consonant segments in phonological inventories, based on a sample of 2761 languages. We show that the feature-economy principle is able to account for many important patterns in the structure of the world's phonological inventories; however, there are particular classes of sounds, such as what we term the ‘basic consonant inventory’ (the core cluster of segments found in the majority of the world's languages), as well as several more peripheral clusters whose organisation follows different principles.

Many languages exhibit nasal cluster dissimilation, in which an illicit sequence of nasal–stop clusters is modified in some way (e.g. NC1VNC2 → N1VNC2). This article discusses generalisations in the typology of nasal cluster dissimilation, and claims that nasal cluster dissimilation is driven by constraints on contrast distinctiveness: it occurs preferentially in those environments where the first NC is most confusable with a plain nasal consonant. I propose an analysis that appeals to auditory factors, and provide acoustic and perceptual evidence that is consistent with it.