Sounding out Sonority

Abstract

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.

Phonological contrast and phonetic variation: The case of velars in Iwaidja

“…Alongside our articulatory measure of vowel dissimilarity, we also computed the change in acoustic intensity across relevant /…aCa…/ intervals. Intensity provides an acoustic correlate of sonority and associated changes in manner (Parker 2008(Parker , 2017. A drop in acoustic intensity for the C in /…aCa…/ is expected; the degree of the intensity drop depends on the manner of the C. Since our data set includes both articulatory data and associated acoustic recordings, we are able to test the assumption of past work that intensity indexes constriction degree (e.g.…”

Universal Restrictions in Reading: What Do French Beginning Readers (Mis)perceive?

“…Consonants are ranked from high-sonority phonemes (i.e., from liquid to nasal -labeled sonorant -) to low-sonority phonemes (i.e., from fricative to occlusive -labeled obstruent -; see Figure 1) 1 . However, sonority remains a controversial linguistic concept, whose nature and origin are a matter of debate (e.g., Clements, 1990Clements, , 2006Ladefoged, 2001;Hayes and Steriade, 2004;Parker, 2008Parker, , 2017. Beyond the question of whether sonority is a formally grounded linguistic constraint (i.e., an innate linguistic primitive) or a functionally grounded linguistic constraint derived from speakers' linguistic experience of the acousticphonetic properties of sounds (e.g., Parker, 2017), sonority has different descriptions.…”

“…However, sonority remains a controversial linguistic concept, whose nature and origin are a matter of debate (e.g., Clements, 1990Clements, , 2006Ladefoged, 2001;Hayes and Steriade, 2004;Parker, 2008Parker, , 2017. Beyond the question of whether sonority is a formally grounded linguistic constraint (i.e., an innate linguistic primitive) or a functionally grounded linguistic constraint derived from speakers' linguistic experience of the acousticphonetic properties of sounds (e.g., Parker, 2017), sonority has different descriptions. Clements (1990Clements ( , 2006, for example, emphasizes the elusive phonetic correlates in sonority, while Parker (2008) considers that phonological sonority has concrete, quantifiable physical and perceptual properties.…”

“…Clements (1990Clements ( , 2006, for example, emphasizes the elusive phonetic correlates in sonority, while Parker (2008) considers that phonological sonority has concrete, quantifiable physical and perceptual properties. Indeed, it has been proposed that sonority is a phonological property of sounds, with their acoustic intensity being the most reliable correlate (e.g., Parker, 2017). In any case, this basic hierarchy of individual sonorities seems to be insufficient, so we now focus on sonority-based linguistic principles to account for restrictions and constraints on the co-occurrence of sounds within and across syllables: the Sonority Sequencing Principle (Clements, 1990(Clements, , 2006 and the Syllable Contact Law (e.g.…”

Revealing lecturer’s paralinguistic attribution: How the visual manner contributes to students’ non-cognitive skills

“…Based on the emp irical portrait upon the lecturer's sonority, the lecturer might consider some sonority aspects to support her writ ing instruction. In a particu lar, Parker (2017) conveyed that the conceptualizat ion of sonority squarely places in the realm o f phonology, since the structure man ifested in different categories, such as obstruents, sonorants, and vowels that drove the phonological inventories (Hauser, 2014), wh ilst the sonority profile intrinsically depended on two segments and the relationships to the nearest sonority peaks to predict the sonority contour. However, both segments and relationships would not only determine the sequencing principle fro m the lexicon, phonetic experience, and innate, but they adequately represented speakers' performance (Daland et al, 2011).…”