It is well-attested that floating tones can associate across a word boundary, but it is typologically unusual for floating weight units to do so. The Nuer language presents a floating suprasegmental component (FSC), which is part of lexical morphemes, and includes a unit of quantity and a High tone. This component is located at the left edge of nouns and is realised primarily across a word boundary on a preceding vowel. This article examines the FSC through a phonological analysis and a production study with eight speakers. These investigations reveal how the FSC interacts with the specifications for vowel length and tone of the adjacent context. Specifically, the weight unit of the FSC lengthens a preceding word-final short vowel, and its High tone combines in a compositional manner with tone of this preceding context. Comparisons with related languages suggest that the FSC developed out of a word-initial vowel /a/.

It is well-known that English variable word-final coronal stop deletion (CSD) is less likely to occur when the final coronal stop instantiates the inflectional suffix -ed. It is sometimes hypothesised that the reason for this effect is to avoid the homophony between past and present tenses that would result from the suffix -ed being deleted. This reasoning suggests another hypothesis: that CSD should also be disfavoured when it would create homophony between two distinct lexical items, such as bald and ball. In this squib, we test that hypothesis on data from a corpus of Philadelphia English. We find no evidence that probability of CSD is affected by homophony avoidance between lexical items. This weakens the case that homophony avoidance is at play in disfavouring CSD in the -ed case, and may have implications for the theory of homophony avoidance in phonology in general.

This Illustration focuses on Kua’nsi (kʰwa33n̩21si33, ISO639: ykn), a Central Ngwi (or Yi) language of the Sino-Tibetan family (Bradley 1997; Fan et al., 2017). It is spoken by approximately 5000 people in Liuhe Township (六合乡, Liùhé Xiāng), Heqing County (鹤庆县, Hèqìng Xiàn), Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province, China (see the map in Figure 1). Kua’nsi people refer to themselves as Kua’eshi (夸萼氏 Kuà’èshì) in Chinese and other ethnic groups, Bai (白 Bái) and Han (汉 Hàn) people living in the county, call them as Baiyi people (白依人 Báiyīrén) in Chinese because of their white traditional clothes.

Mismatches in weight criteria across weight-sensitive processes within individual languages present difficulties for theories of moraic structure, particularly regarding coda weight. Previous accounts, which stipulate that codas are variably moraic to account for the typological variation in the weight status of CVC for primary stress, make incorrect predictions for the status of CVC in other weight-sensitive phenomena, including tone, word minimality and secondary stress, among others. This article proposes a theory of Uniform Moraic Quantity coupled with a new syllable weight metric as a solution, which captures CVC’s flexible weight status while maintaining the cross-linguistic moraicity of codas and avoiding the incorrect predictions that frustrate the standard variable-weight approach.

This study investigated lateral asymmetry in the linguopalatal speech sounds of British English by means of electropalatography. This instrumental technique visualizes tongue–palate contact during speech production and allows for the quantification of contact patterns. The first and main objective of the study was to establish a method of measuring asymmetry that would be more sensitive than the approach used previously and would facilitate statistical analysis. The method employed a modified index of asymmetry and controlled for the overall amount of tongue–palate contact. The secondary objective was to use the proposed method to quantify asymmetry in the production of the linguopalatal consonants of British English, focusing on asymmetry observed in the region of the palate corresponding to the place of articulation. Regression analysis of 22,004 speech sounds, produced by four native speakers, indicated that the approximant /l/ is the most asymmetrical speech sound, followed by the central approximants /j, r/. Although fricatives had been hypothesized to be highly asymmetrical, they were not consistently more asymmetrical than plosives. In terms of the place of articulation of speech sounds, velar sounds were less asymmetrical than alveolars. It was possible to account for some of these findings by referring to the unilateral productions of approximants.

This study looked at the realization of the high-level Tone 1 in Taiwan Mandarin to examine a public impression of the central dialect, which is said to have a tendency to end with a rise. Fifty-three Mandarin native speakers (27 northern and 26 central) were recruited. Half performed a reading task and half a word-guessing task on 24 disyllabic words with Tone 1 embedded. Results showed rising realizations were the most prominent for the tone, regardless of dialect, gender, genre, and syllable position, but were more prevalent among females than males, and more common and enlarged in the final than the non-final position. Dialectal differences were twofold and mainly lay in the acoustic realization. Central speakers showed both a lower pitch register and a steeper declination than their northern counterparts, and central females also demonstrated an upstep in the final position of the word-guessing task, which completely annihilated the effect of the downtrend. This implies the impressionistic tendency to end high indeed exists in the Tone 1 of the central variety, but its percept is not based on rising realizations alone. Instead, it stands out as a dialectal feature via an enlargement of the rise in the foreground against a disruption of the downward trend in the background. The female lead in the realization suggests the rising Tone 1 does not come with a negative connotation. Perceptual tolerance for the variant likely stemmed from a long-standing free variation between high-level and high-rise for the tone.

This study investigates the voice onset time (VOT) of stops in Bahdini Kurdish, which are characterized by a three-way laryngeal contrast of voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated and voiced stops. Thirty native speakers read a forty-word list three times, which included three examples of each stop in pre-vocalic onset position. Words were chosen based on specific contextual factors to account for place of articulation, laryngeal state, following vowel height, and length contrasts. The findings show that VOT distinguishes stop categories in Kurdish, with voicing lead indicating voiced stops, short lag for voiceless unaspirated stops and long lag for voiceless aspirated stops. Results of the linear mixed-effects model show that laryngeal state, place of articulation, following vowel height and length had significant effects on VOT. The gender of the participants, however, showed no significant effect on VOT. In line with most research on the effect of place of articulation on VOT, in voiceless aspirated stop categories, bilabials had the shortest VOT, followed by dentals and velars. Voiceless unaspirated bilabials had the shortest VOT values, followed by dentals, uvulars and then velars. Voiced stops do not show such a pattern. These results are compatible with other research on Indo-Iranian languages with three-way laryngeal categories.

A key goal in phonology is to understand the factors that affect phonological learning. This article addresses the issue by examining how paradigms are reanalysed over time. Malagasy has a class of stems called weak stems, whose final consonants alternate under suffixation. Comparison of historical and modern Malagasy shows that weak stem paradigms have undergone extensive reanalysis in a way that cannot be predicted by the probabilistic distribution of alternants. This poses a problem for existing quantitative models of reanalysis, where reanalysis is always towards the most probable alternant. I argue instead that reanalysis in Malagasy is driven by both distributional factors and a markedness bias. To capture the Malagasy pattern, I propose a maximum entropy learning model, with a markedness bias implemented via the model’s prior probability distribution. This biased model successfully predicts the direction of reanalysis in Malagasy, outperforming purely distributional models.