The role of abstract phonological representations in word production: Evidence from phonemic paraphasias

On the nature of sonority in spoken word production: Evidence from neuropsychology

“…Individuals with acquired speech deficits show similar variability to the one reported in developmental studies. However, we also note that in some previously reported neuropsychological studies, errors resulted in rather consistent improvement of sonority profiles (Béland et al, 1990;Den Ouden & Bastiaanse, 2005;Romani & Galluzzi, 2005;Romani et al, 2011). It is presently unclear why the effects of sonority in aphasic errors varies in strengths and in what circumstances other mechanisms would interact with sonority in determining the forms that error would take (see Goldrick & Daland, 2009 for more general discussion of grammatically-based variation in aphasic errors).…”

“…Both within languages and cross-linguistically, unmarked syllables tend to outnumber marked syllables (Blevins, 1995;Greenberg, 1978). Further, empirical studies of both language acquisition and language loss have also revealed that errors tend to concentrate on marked sequences (e.g., Bastiaanse, Gilbers, & van der Linde, 1994;Béland, Caplan, & Nespoulous, 1990;Buchwald, 2009;Buckingham, 1986;Christman, 1994;Ohala, 1999;Romani & Calabrese, 1998;Romani, Galluzzi, Bureca, & Olson, 2011). In addition, recognition has been reported to be more accurate for unmarked than marked syllables in experimental conditions hindering perception (e.g., by introducing of noise; Berent et al, 2008), although sonority does not account for all differences that were related to perceptual change (Davidson, 2011;Davidson & Shaw, 2012), indicating that sonority is one factor affecting sound structure processing.…”

“…Within theoretical linguistics, the concept of sonority has been argued to explain such diverse phenomena as syllable structure (e.g., Clements, 1990;Selkirk, 1982;Zec, 1995), phonotactic rules (e.g., Blevins, 1995), the emergence of prosodic features (e.g., Rialland, 1994), cross-linguistic variation (Greenberg, 1978), and diachronic changes (Crowley & Bowern, 2010). In turn, a number of experimental investigations has revealed sonority as one of the factors predicting the chronology of sequences mastered by young children (e.g., Goad, in press;Locke, 1983;Ohala, 1999;Pater, 2009), the rate and type of errors observed in individuals with developmental or acquired language impairments (e.g., Bastiaanse, Gilbers, & van der Linde, 1994;Buckingham, 1986;Béland, Caplan, & Nespoulous, 1990;Christman, 1994;Romani & Calabrese, 1998;Romani & Galluzzi, 2005;Romani, Olson, Semenza, & Granà, 2002;Stenneken, Bastiaanse, Huber, & Jacobs, 2005), and aspects of speakers' implicit knowledge of phonological grammar as measured by perception and production tasks (Berent, Lennertz, Jun, Moreno, & Smolensky, 2008;Daland et al, 2011) although it has been noted that sonority does not account for the entire range of variation in these investigations (Davidson, 2011;Davidson & Shaw, 2012). Despite the explanatory power of this notion, there is not clear agreement on exactly what sonority represents, with one prominent researcher (Clements, 2009) describing the current state of knowledge on the nature of sonority as ''elusive' ' (p. 165).…”

The WEAVER model of word-form encoding in speech production

“…WEAVER deals with the issue of syllabification across morpheme and word boundaries by computing (e.g., Béland et al, 1990;Caplan, 1992;Levelt, 1992) instead of storing syllabifications (e.g., Dell, 1986Dell, , 1988Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1979). The on-line syllabification takes neighboring morphemes and words into account in that syllable positions are computed for phonological words rather than for lexical ones (Booij, 1983(Booij, , 1995McCarthy and Prince, 1990).…”

Sonority and its role in the acquisition of complex coda clusters by Spanish speakers learning English as a second language

“…The work of Caplan and Nespoulous (1990) supports the claim that consonantal omissions in onset constituents (by far the most frequent type of error produced by aphasic subjects) fall under rules predicted by the sonority hierarchy. In all cases, the aphasic subject deletes the liquid in a sequence of obstruent-liquid as well as in a sequence of obstruent-liquid-glide.…”