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Results of an acoustic study of voiceless fricatives in seven languages are presented. Three measurements were taken: duration, center of gravity, and overall spectral shape. In addition, formant transitions from adjacent vowels were measured for a subset of the fricatives in certain languages. Fricatives were well differentiated in terms of overall spectral shape and their coarticulation effects on formant transitions for adjacent vowels. The center of gravity measurement also proved useful in differentiating certain fricatives. Duration generally was less useful in differentiating the fricatives. In general, results were consistent across speakers and languages, with lateral fricatives displaying the greatest interspeaker variation in their acoustic properties and /s/ providing the greatest source of interspeaker variation.

Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Structure (1997)

It is proposed that syllable weight is driven by considerations of phonetic effectiveness and phonological simplicity. The phonetically best distinctions are claimed to be those which divide syllables into groups which are phonetically most distinct from each other. Phonologically complex distinctions are those which exceed an upper threshold in the number of phonological predicates to which they refer. It is claimed that languages adopt weight distinctions which are phonetically most effective without being overly complex phonologically. Syllable weight thus reflects a compromise between phonetic and phonological factors. The proposed model of weight further suggests that phonological weight distinctions are ultimately predictable from other basic phonological properties, such as syllable structure. * 1. SYLLABLE WEIGHT. Linguists have long observed that certain phonological processes in many languages distinguish between "heavy" and "light" syllables (e.g. Jakobson 1931, Trubetzkoy 1939, Allen 1973, Hyman 1977, 1992, McCarthy 1979, Zec 1988, Hayes 1989. Syllable weight has played an increasingly larger role in more recent phonological theory, as the number of prosodic phenomena argued to instantiate syllable weight has grown to encompass many diverse phenomena such as weight-sensitive stress, compensatory lengthening, reduplication, minimal word requirements, tone, among others. Drawing on data from these weight-sensitive phenomena, linguists have developed simple yet compelling theories of weight grounded in fundamental concepts such as phonemic length, segment count and sonority.As our data base on weight-sensitive phenomena has expanded to include ever more explicit information on a larger cross-section of languages, theories of weight have been presented with new and interesting opportunities for empirical validation. While the expanded empirical base has corroborated many standard notions about syllable weight, it has also brought new challenges to the theory of weight: an increasingly diverse set of weight distinctions cross-linguistically, individual languages sensitive to multiple weight distinctions, weight distinctions based neither on the number of segments nor on phonemic length contrasts, and cases of conflicted weight criteria for different weight-sensitive processes in the same language. These new data continue to necessitate expansions of the formal apparatus in the theory of weight, suggesting the need for reexamination of the phenomenon of syllable weight. This paper explores the extent to which syllable weight is linked to both structural and phonetic properties. As such, it may be viewed as part of two research programs: one relating the phonology of weight and phonetic properties (see, for example,

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