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Phonotactics and syllable structure form an integral part of phonological competence and may be used to discover other aspects of language. Given the importance of such knowledge to the process of language acquisition, numerous studies have investigated the development of phonotactic and syllabic knowledge in order to determine when infants become sensitive to these sound patterns and how they may use this knowledge in language processing. Considering that infants’ first exposure to linguistic structures comes from speech perception, we provide an overview of the perception-related issues that have been investigated experimentally and point out issues that have not yet been addressed in the literature. We begin with phonotactic development, examining a wide range of sound patterns, followed by a discussion of the acquisition of syllable structure and a brief summary of various outstanding issues that may be of interest to the reader, including production-related investigations and phonological modeling studies.

In this article, we analyze the phonetic realizations of devoiced vowels from 8 fluent speakers of Southern Ute, a severely endangered Southern Numic Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Southwestern Colorado. Devoiced vowels are considered to be an important aspect of the phonology of Southern Ute, yet very little is known about the pronunciation of such segments. Our findings indicate that devoiced vowels are realized phonetically in three ways: (i) fully voiceless, (ii) partially devoiced, and (iii) fully reduced with concurrent lengthening, lower intensity and greater voicelessness of the preceding consonant. Such variable and noncategorical devoicing is seen for both high and nonhigh vowels and all consonants regardless of their manner of articulation.