On the importance of being noticed: the role of acoustic salience in phonotactics (and casual speech)

Baroni, Antonio

doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2014.06.004

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…However, there are also a number of other, less investigated factors that are likely to play a role in language-specific acquisition trajectories: the syllable structure, foot structure, frequency (e.g. Kehoe et al 2008), saliency (Baroni 2014) and the primary and secondary status of the cluster (Andreassen 2013). For instance, there is a strong tendency for French towards monosyllabism resulting in a reduced number of morphemes per words and hence in fewer morphological boundaries and reduced morphonotactics.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental, Acquisitional and Corpus linguistic Approaches to the Study of Morphonotactics

Dressler¹,

Calderone²,

Sommer-Lolei³

et al. 2021

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This volume unites six contributions on morphonotactics of consonant clusters and its difference to phonotactics (in a narrow sense). Morphonotactics comprises that part of phonotactics (in the large sense) which is due to interaction with morphology. It deals prototypically with clusters which are due to morphological concatenation as in the word-final consonant cluster in Ger. (er/sie) mach-t '(he/she) make-s', which is morphonotactic vs. its phonotactic homophonous equivalent Macht 'power'. The opening chapter introduces into the area of morphonotactics and into the following five chapters which deal with German or French morphonotactics or both. The first represents the first corpuslinguistic analysis of German morphonotactics based on a large electronic corpus, the second investigates phonetic processing in both languages, the remaining three, equally distributed between both languages, with the impact of (mor)phonotactics on processing and language acquisition. Thus, this volume unites phonological, morphological, phonetic, psycholinguistic, corpuslinguistic and typological perspectives integrated into a series of experimental approaches. The volume publishes selectively results of a bilateral research project funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental, Acquisitional and Corpus linguistic Approaches to the Study of Morphonotactics

Dressler¹,

Calderone²,

Sommer-Lolei³

et al. 2021

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“…A second problem that has received much less attention in the literature (but see Baroni, 2014) is the general failure of traditional sonority principles to correctly account for different types of sonority plateaus. Sonority plateaus can result from different types of consonants of the same class, regardless of the class type.…”

Section: Gaps In Empirical Coveragementioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling sonority in terms of pitch intelligibility with the Nucleus Attraction Principle

Albert¹,

Nicenboim²

2020

Preprint

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Sonority is a fundamental notion in phonetics and phonology, central to many descriptions of the syllable and evidently useful as a predictor of phonotactics (i.e., the propensity of different consonants and vowels to combine via concatenation). Although widely-accepted, sonority lacks a clear basis in speech articulation or perception, and traditional sonority principles exhibit gaps in empirical coverage, while they are also not designed to be compatible with general cognitive capacities. Against the backdrop of traditional sonority accounts, which have been exclusively based on discrete and symbolic machinery to model sonority, we propose an incorporation of symbol-based and signal-based models to adequately account for sonority with two complementary models. We claim that sonority is primarily a perceptual phenomenon related to the strength and quality of pitch perception, postulating a universal drive to optimize syllables as pitch-bearing units. We suggest a measurable acoustic correlate for sonority in terms of periodic energy, and we provide a novel principle that can account for syllabic well-formedness based on principles of competition in real-time; the Nucleus Attraction Principle (NAP). We present two perception experiments that test our two NAP-based models against four traditional sonority models and we use a Bayesian data analysis approach to test and compare the different sonority models. We show that our two NAP models retain the highest degree of complementarity while one of them is clearly superior to all the other models we tested. We interpret the results as providing strong support for our proposals: (i) the designation of periodic energy as sonority's correlate; (ii) the incorporation of continuity in phonological models, and; (iii) the dual-model strategy that separates and integrates symbol-based top-down processes and signal-based bottom-up processes.

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“…This challenge has led some linguists to posit a perceptually based alternative to sonority in which phonological strings that enhance auditory cue recoverability are those most likely to be favored and hence preserved over time (Henke, Kaisse, & Wright, ; Wright, ). Some works in the appendix that pursue this more functional type of explanation include Bakst and Katz (); Baroni (, ); Bray (); Davidson and Shaw (); and Engstrand and Ericsdotter ().…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sounding out Sonority

Parker

2017

Language and Linguist. Compass

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This metastudy summarizes 264 recent experimental works involving sonority. The discussion here centers around an accompanying appendix that lists several details of each study, including the research question or hypothesis, outcome, language of focus, stimuli used to probe for the effect of sonority, methodology used to present test items and/or obtain results, participants' task, variables measured, and keywords. These metadata are presented in an Excel spreadsheet in order to give users flexibility to search and sort by details of interest, either alone or in various combinations. The overall findings of the 264 studies are naturally somewhat mixed but in general provide moderate support for the linguistic relevance of sonority.

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On the importance of being noticed: the role of acoustic salience in phonotactics (and casual speech)

Cited by 5 publications

References 12 publications

Experimental, Acquisitional and Corpus linguistic Approaches to the Study of Morphonotactics

Experimental, Acquisitional and Corpus linguistic Approaches to the Study of Morphonotactics

Modeling sonority in terms of pitch intelligibility with the Nucleus Attraction Principle

Sounding out Sonority

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