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Article published In: The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 10:1 (2015) ► pp.88–132

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On the sonority levels of fricatives and stops

 | Northeastern University
 | Northeastern University
Published online: 1 May 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.10.1.04len
Across languages, stop-sonorant onsets are preferred to fricative-sonorant ones (e.g., pna ≻ fna), suggesting that stop-initial onsets are better formed. Here, we ask whether this preference is active in the linguistic competence of English speakers. To address this question, we compare stop- and fricative-nasal onsets (e.g., pnik vs. fnik) to matched obstruent-obstruent controls (e.g., ptik vs. fsik, respectively). Past research has shown that (a) stop-stop onsets (e.g., ptik) are dispreferred to stop-nasal onsets (e.g., pnik); and (b) dispreferred onsets tend to be misidentified (e.g., ptik → pәtik). We thus reasoned that, if fricative-nasal onsets (e.g., fnik) are worse formed relative to stop-nasal ones (e.g., pnik), then fnik-type onsets should be more vulnerable to misidentification, hence, their advantage over obstruent-obstruent controls (e.g., fsik) should be attenuated. Consequently, when compared to the obstruent-obstruent baseline (e.g., ptik, fsik), misidentification should be less prevalent in stop-nasal onsets (e.g., pnik) compared to fricative-nasal ones (e.g., fnik). The results of three experiments are consistent with this prediction. Our findings suggest that English speakers possess linguistic preferences that mirror the distribution of onset clusters across languages.
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Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Albert, Aviad & Bruno Nicenboim
2022. Modeling Sonority in Terms of Pitch Intelligibility With the Nucleus Attraction Principle. Cognitive Science 46:7 DOI logo
Zhao, Xu & Iris Berent
2018. The Basis of the Syllable Hierarchy: Articulatory Pressures or Universal Phonological Constraints?. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 47:1 ► pp. 29 ff. DOI logo
Parker, Steve
2017. Sounding out Sonority. Language and Linguistics Compass 11:9 DOI logo
Berent, Iris
2016. Commentary: “An Evaluation of Universal Grammar and the Phonological Mind”—UG Is Still a Viable Hypothesis. Frontiers in Psychology 7 DOI logo
성은경
2016. Perception of onset clusters by English and Korean listeners: Universal markedness and L2 phonotactic knowledge. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology 22:3 ► pp. 477 ff. DOI logo

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