sound level protrusions as physical correlates of sonority

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Journal of Phonetics 36 (2008) 55–90

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Sound level protrusions as physical correlates of sonority

Steve Parkera,b,�

aGraduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, SIL International, University of North Dakota, 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Road,

Dallas, TX 75236, USAbUniversity of Texas at Arlington, Texas, USA

Received 3 April 2006; received in revised form 3 September 2007; accepted 11 September 2007

Abstract

A long-standing controversy in the interface between phonetics and phonology involves the nature of sonority: does it

even exist and, if so, what are its phonetic correlates, and how can this be empirically demonstrated? This paper seeks to

help resolve this problem by providing physical evidence supporting the sonority hierarchy. This is accomplished by

reporting the results of a rigorous experiment measuring sound levels of realizations of all phonemes in English, Spanish,

and Quechua. The obtained intensity values yield an overall mean Spearman’s correlation of .91 with the proposed

sonority indices. Consequently, one possible way to informally characterize sonority is in terms of a linear regression

equation based on the observed intensity results. In light of these findings, the frequent claim that sonority lacks a reliable

phonetic basis can no longer be maintained.

r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

‘‘[W]hen you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers you know something
about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of ameagre and unsatisfactory kind’’ Lord Kelvin (Thomson, 1891, p. 80).
1. Introduction

The notion of sonority, as used in linguistics today, was probably first introduced by Sievers (1876/1893) asSchallfulle ‘sound fullness.’ In his work, this concept refers to the relative loudness of speech sounds and isused to explain both the perception of syllables and their phonotactic structure. Sievers proposes two relatedprosodic units: Drucksilben ‘pressure syllables,’ with a sonority maximum due to a peak in expiratory pressure,and Schallsilben ‘sound syllables,’ whose sonority peak is merely auditory. Later, in the literature of the 20thcentury, most discussions of sonority mention Sievers’ seminal research in this area.

Nevertheless, it is often asserted that sonority has never been adequately defined (Clements, 1990, p. 298;Kawasaki, 1982, p. 44; Kenstowicz, 1994, p. 254). Furthermore, many different versions of the phonologicalsonority hierarchy have been posited, reflecting widespread disagreement concerning its details ofimplementation (cf. Section 2). One potential implication of this diversity of opinions is that sonority might

e front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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ARTICLE IN PRESSS. Parker / Journal of Phonetics 36 (2008) 55–9056

not be a genuine linguistic construct after all. On the other hand, these controversies also suggest that somelinguists may have overlooked Sievers’ important results in this field. Consequently, two chronic issues in theinterface between phonology and phonetics in the last century have been whether there is a physical basis forsonority and, if so, which physical parameter best reflects it? Since Sievers’ time many other proposals have beenmade, but no consensus has emerged (Parker, 2002). Some people even deny the existence of sonority altogether(Ohala, 1974, 1990a, b), typically based on two arguments: sonority has been notoriously difficult to characterizein concrete terms, and phonological generalizations based on sonority (Section 2) often have exceptions. Forexample, /pl/ and /kl/ make good onsets in many languages, even though */tl/ is frequently prohibited, indicatingthat sonority is not the only relevant factor at work. A related problem is that very few definitions of sonorityhave been empirically tested via rigorous, systematic experimentation (perhaps the first recorded, albeit informalattempt to do so is that of Wolf (1871, p. 71), cf. Parker (2002, pp. 59–60)). The purpose of this paper is toprovide empirical evidence that sonority is correlated with a measurable physical parameter, therebysubstantiating sonority as a viable phonological device. An instrumental study of three languages (Spanish,Quechua, and English) will show that typical phonological sonority indices are strongly correlated withsegmental intensity (as measured by relative sound levels).1 Thus a partially new conceptualization of thephysical realization of sonority will emerge: the sound level values at protrusions or extremes, i.e., values at thepoint of maximal and minimal intensity within individual speech sounds. Measuring peak sound levels of vowels(as a correlate of sonority) alludes back to and confirms Sievers’ (1876/1893) original proposal, and has otherprecedents in the literature (Section 3). However, the procedure of reporting the value at the point of lowestintensity in consonants appears to be a new methodological approach, at least insofar as it relates to sonority.

2. A review of the literature on sonority

This section summarizes the phonological and physical evidence for sonority, based on a more completereview in Parker (2002). The goal is to establish a fully developed sonority hierarchy—within its properhistorical context—as a basis for comparing the experimental phonetic data. Since the sonority ranks positedbelow will be used to evaluate the obtained instrumental results, it is necessary to consider these issues in somedetail. The most cogent and compelling evidence for sonority classes, and their respective ordering, comesfrom phonotactic constraints and morphophonemic alternations. Consequently, the argumentation in thissection will be limited to these two criteria.

After Sievers’ foundational treatise, the importance of sonority in syllable structure has been repeatedlysubstantiated. Cross-linguistic studies have identified five generalizations involving the sonority hierarchy thatare attested in enough languages to warrant formal phonological constraints: (1) the Sonority SequencingPrinciple, which dictates that in every syllable there is exactly one peak of sonority, contained in the nucleus(Blevins, 1995; Hooper, 1976; Selkirk, 1984). This generalization is cited in one form or another by nearly alllinguists from Sievers and Jespersen (1904, 1922) onwards. (2) Restrictions on minimum sonority distancebetween tautomarginal consonant clusters (Selkirk, 1984; Steriade, 1982). For example, in Spanish an onsetsuch as */pn/ is ungrammatical while /pl/ is fine since laterals are higher in sonority than nasals (Baertsch,2002; Harris, 1983). (3) The Sonority Dispersion Principle, by which onset+nucleus demisyllables are morepreferred (unmarked) when their segments are maximally and evenly dispersed in sonority. The same tendencyis inverted in rhymes (Clements, 1990). For instance, the ideal initial demisyllable consists of a voiceless stopplus a low vowel (e.g., /t]/), ceteris paribus. (4) The Syllable Contact Law, by which heterosyllabic junctures ofthe form C1.C2 are more well-formed the higher the sonority of C1 and the lower the sonority of C2 (Bat-El,1996; Davis, 1998; Gouskova, 2004; Hooper, 1976; Murray & Vennemann, 1983; Rose, 2000; Vennemann,1988). Clements (1990) notes that this law can in fact be derived from the Sonority Dispersion Principle.(5) Relative weight effects, by which syllables tend to attract stress in proportion to the sonority of theirnucleus and/or coda. For example, syllables headed by /e/ or /o/ may pattern as heavier than those with /i/ and/u/ (de Lacy, 2002, 2004; Kenstowicz, 1997).

1The term intensity is used here in the generic sense to refer to the general magnitude of a sound, as opposed to the more technical sense

of power per unit area. In this paper, intensity will be measured as sound level differences in decibels between a target segment and a

constant reference segment in the environment, as described in Sections 3 and 4.

ARTICLE IN PRESSS. Parker / Journal of Phonetics 36 (2008) 55–90 57

The paragraph above lists a number of phonological patterns which, taken together, strongly motivatesome notion of sonority as a basic grammatical principle. Hence, the function of sonority in humanlanguages is well understood. Nevertheless, disagreement arises when we confront the question of howspecific speech sounds should be arranged into a hierarchical scale reflecting their relative inherentsonority. Numerous such scales have been proposed; Parker (2002) identifies over 100 distinct varieties—too many to repeat all of them here—yet their similarities and differences can be summarized. Many ofthese hierarchies are based on language-specific phonotactic restrictions (e.g., Levin, 1985; Selkirk, 1984;Steriade, 1982). Several primary issues form the crux of the debate, but these can only be briefly reviewedhere, not conclusively resolved: how many and what kinds of natural class divisions need to be made inthe sonority hierarchy? Are any of these reversible? And, is the resulting hierarchy universal or language-particular? Each of these problems will be considered in turn in the remainder of this section. However,while these questions are important ones for phonological theory to consider, only the first one (theinternal structure and composition of the sonority hierarchy) is immediately relevant to this paper:the sonority indices we will use to compare with segmental sound levels must be motivated by robustcross-linguistic evidence so we can be confident of the results. Consequently, the majority of the discussionhere will focus on this topic (which sonority classes and rankings need to be posited). The other twoquestions (the reversibility and universality of sonority ranks) must largely be relegated to future workand thus are touched on here only in passing. The discussion in Parker (2002) deals with these issues muchmore deeply.

Despite these controversies, there is in fact strong consensus about most of the ranks in cross-linguisticsonority hierarchies, especially when dealing with major phonological groupings. For example, the relativeplacement of five principal categories is basically indisputable, so long as we consider prototypical exemplarssuch as voiced sonorants, etc.:

(1) Minimal sonority hierarchy

vowels4glides (semivowels)4liquids4nasals4obstruents.Most treatments of sonority distinguish at least the five classes shown in (1), and many linguists indeed stop

here since further subdivisions are more difficult to substantiate. For example, the following works (inter alia)assume the scale in (1): Bell and Hooper (1978), Harris (1983), Clements (1990), Kenstowicz (1994),Smolensky (1995), and de Lacy (1997). One major justification for this hierarchy is the Sonority SequencingPrinciple, by which the propensity for a sound to occur in a syllable rhyme vs. onset is directly proportional tohow high vs. low, respectively, it is in sonority (Blevins, 1995). Furthermore, within onset and coda clusters,consonant sequences strongly prefer to rise and fall in sonority, respectively. All of these patterns are widelyattested and strongly enforced in most languages. For example, many languages allow obstruent plus liquidonset clusters, whereas languages that permit liquid+obstruent in onset position are extremely rare andalways attest obstruent+liquid as well, while the inverse is not true (a typological implicature; cf. Greenberg,1978).

Some sonority scales, such as that displayed in (1), make no distinctions between segment types within themajor classes vowels, liquids, and obstruents. However, the weight of the overall evidence indicates that thereis sufficient motivation for positing subdivisions within these three groupings. Among obstruents, for example,one schism often made is to rank fricatives above stops. To illustrate, in Sanskrit a verb base beginning with aconsonant cluster retains the less sonorous of the two segments in the full grade prefixal reduplicant:/pr]tPh/-[p]-pr]tPh] ‘ask’; /sw]r/-[s]-sw]r] ‘sound’. Now consider the forms /ts]r/-[t]-ts]r] ‘approachstealthily’ and /sth]:/-[t]-sth]:] ‘stand’ (Kager, 1999; Steriade, 1982, 1988; Whitney, 1889). The simple,obvious generalization is that the reduplicant retains the onset consonant which is lower in sonority.Otherwise, when all obstruents are lumped together vis-a-vis sonority, the analysis has to be complicated(cf. Benua, 1997; Hironymous, 1999). Similarly, Gnanadesikan (1995) reports analogous forms from a 2;9speaker of English: snow is pronounced as [so], sky-[k>j], and straw-[t>]. Furthermore, in Pali, consonantstotally assimilate to adjacent consonants which are lower in sonority: /dis-j]-/-[diss]-] ‘see-passive’;/k]r-tum: /-[k]ttum: ] ‘make-infinitive’. The following two forms indicate that Pali also treats fricatives asmore sonorous than stops: /v]s-tum: /-[v]tthum: ] ‘dwell-infinitive’; /w]k-ss]-/-[w]kkh]-] ‘speak-future’
(Hankamer & Aissen, 1974; Parker, 2002).


Another split often made is to rank voiced obstruents over their voiceless counterparts. For example, KoineGreek permits the clusters /pn/ and /kn/ but proscribes */bn/ and */dn/ (Mounce, 1993). This instantiates oneof Greenberg’s (1978) typological universals, and can be explained as a straightforward effect of minimumsonority distance between the two members of onset clusters if voiced stops are closer to nasals (in sonority)than voiceless stops are. Scales which rank voiced obstruents over voiceless ones include those of Jespersen(1904), Lass (1984), Selkirk (1984), Gnanadesikan (1997), Gouskova (2004), and Gordon (2005a).

A more difficult issue is the relative placement of voiceless fricatives vs. voiced stops. Since obstruentclusters usually agree in voicing, crucial diagnostic (phonotactic) examples are rare (Boersma, 1998; Hooper,1976). Nevertheless, a few tokens do exist. For example, one piece of evidence is the English word midst, inwhich d is closer to the nucleus than s is. Since this form consists of a single syllable, /d/ is arguably higher insonority than /s/ (in English) by the Sonority Sequencing Principle.2 In this paper I posit that voiced stopsoutrank voiceless fricatives in the sonority scale, for the sake of being restrictive. While this ranking is moretentative than certain others, many sources adopt this stance, including Jespersen (1904), Bolinger (1962),Alderete (1995), Boersma (1998), Gouskova (2004), and Gordon (2005a).

To conclude the discussion of obstruents, affricates are another item of controversy. Cross-linguisticallythey pattern with both stops and fricatives. Many treatments of sonority ignore affricates entirely, perhapsbecause of their inherent complications: are they two phonemic units or one, and should they be grouped withstops, with fricatives, with both, or with neither (Escure, 1977; Hankamer & Aissen, 1974; Lavoie, 2000)?Nevertheless, most scales which do include affricates rank them between stops and fricatives (Goldsmith,1990; Hankamer & Aissen, 1974; Ito, 1982; Lass, 1984, etc.). In syllable onsets the two subcomponents ofaffricates follow the Sonority Sequencing Principle by increasing in sonority towards the nucleus while in codaposition they reverse the sonority cline (at the phonetic level). This explains in part why some languagesprohibit syllable-final affricates but not fricatives, e.g., Spanish and Quechua (cf. Section 4). This also concurswith the fact that no known language has a ‘‘reversed’’ affricate consisting of a fricative+stop sequencefunctioning as a single phonological segment, again because this would violate the Sonority SequencingPrinciple (phonetically) in onset position. In this paper, the ranking of affricates between fricatives and stopswill be followed. To summarize thus far, the portion of the sonority hierarchy involving obstruents is assumedhere to be as follows:

2Some speakers may devoice the /d/ in this word in actual speech,

relationship with the form mid.3Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

but it is clearly voiced at the underlying level g

(2) Relative sonority of obstruents
Voiced fricatives More sonorous Voiced affricates Voiced stops Voiceless fricatives Voiceless affricates Voiceless stops Less sonorous
Let us now consider sonorant consonants. The fact that obstruent+nasal onset clusters are more common
than nasal+obstruent demonstrates that nasals are more sonorous than all obstruents by the SonoritySequencing Principle. Also, obstruent+liquid is less marked than (permitted in more languages than)nasal+liquid, suggesting that a minimum sonority distance effect is in operation (Clements, 1990; Greenberg,1978). Furthermore, nasals are much more likely than obstruents to function as syllable peaks (the SonoritySequencing Principle again; Blevins, 1995). Exceptions to the Sonority Sequencing Principle typically fall intotwo groups. First are sequences of nasal+obstruent, especially word-initially.3 In many such cases, however,the nasal is phonetically syllabic and thus does not constitute a true tautosyllabic onset cluster with thefollowing obstruent, as confirmed by the fact that nasals in this situation often bear contrastive tone. On theother hand, genuine prenasalized stops such as /nd/ are complex segments that reverse the sonority slope yetstill pattern as good onsets in some languages. Nevertheless, it can be argued that it is precisely for this reasonthat such segments are more marked (less frequent in the languages of the world) than affricates. The second
iven its derivational


type of exception to the Sonority Sequencing Principle are /s/+stop clusters (common in Germanic languages)such as in the English forms stop, school, etc. These also tend to be more prevalent word-initially thanmedially. In intervocalic position, the /s/ is often parsed as a coda and the stop as the onset of the followingsyllable. These facts have lead to analyses whereby in word-initial clusters the /s/ is treated as an extrasyllabicappendix and licensed by adjoining it directly to a metrical foot (see Churma and Shi (1996) and Cho andKing (2003) for useful discussions of this issue). In this paper, word-initial clusters are not studied, partly toavoid this issue.

Among liquids, flaps and trills are more sonorous than nasals since many languages permit onset clusterswith a flap or trill as second member while prohibiting obstruent+nasal, while the inverse never occurs. Threesuch languages are Spanish (Harris, 1983), Gizrra (Van Bodegraven & Van Bodegraven, 2005), and Kurdish(Kalbasi, 1983). These facts automatically follow as a minimum sonority distance effect if trills and flapsoutrank nasals. Furthermore, flaps can be higher in sonority than trills due to the differences in theirphonotactic patterns in languages like Spanish4: (1) in word-initial position (a common locus of fortition), thecontrast between [r] and [N] is neutralized such that only [r] occurs. (2) In codas it is neutralized in favor of [N](lenition). These two points follow from the Sonority Dispersion Principle (Bonet & Mascaro, 1997). Finally,(3) [N] and [l] appear as the second member of complex onsets, but [r] does not. This is a minimum sonoritydistance effect if [r] is less sonorous than [N] and [l] (Bakovic, 1994; Padgett, 2003). All of these details indicatethat flaps are higher in sonority than trills, which in turn outrank nasals.

Concerning laterals, these need to outrank trills too since Spanish allows obstruent+[l] onsets but not*obstruent+[r]. At the same time, Catalan and Spanish provide evidence that laterals can pattern as lower insonority than flaps. Spanish attests words such as [peN.la] ‘pearl’ (where [.] marks a syllable boundary), yetforms such as hypothetical *[pel.N]] systematically do not occur, while the sequence [l.r] does. Furthermore,when verbs such as /s]liN/ ‘to leave’ are conjugated in the future tense, syncope of the theme vowel /i/ resultsnot in *[s]l.N]] but rather [sal.dNa] ‘(he/she) will leave.’ Here the sequence [l.N] is broken up by an intrusive [d].These facts suggest (by the Syllable Contact Law) that the flap [N] outranks the lateral [l] in sonority, and that[l] in turn is more sonorous than [r], as claimed by Bonet and Mascaro (1997).5

The rhotic approximant /a/ is also higher in sonority than /l/ in English, as indicated by four interrelatedlanguage-specific facts: (1) minimal pairs such as Carl (one syllable) vs. caller or collar (two syllables). Thiscontrast follows from the Sonority Sequencing Principle if /a/ outranks /l/ (Borowsky, 1986; Hammond,1997:fn2). (2) /a/ occupies the nucleus more readily than /l/ does; words like bird have no counterparts with asyllabic l. Another way to say this is that syllabic l is never stressed in English (Zec, 2003). (3) /a/ is the defaultepenthetic coda in Eastern Massachusetts speech (Halle & Idsardi, 1997; McCarthy, 1993). This follows fromthe Sonority Dispersion Principle if /a/ is the most sonorous English consonant available in this position. And(4) /a/ may head a metrical foot, as in curtain, but /l/ never does (Zec, 2003).

Finally, glides are the most sonorous of all consonants cross-linguistically since they pattern as the leastpreferred onset segments but the most unmarked in rhyme position (by the Sonority Dispersion Principle).For example, languages like Maori prohibit codas but allow post-vocalic glides in the nucleus to form fallingdiphthongs (Bauer, 1993). Similarly, in English words like car and card, the /a/ patterns as a coda, but in cow

and cowl the /w/ is structurally part of the nucleus. This demonstrates that glides are higher in sonority than /a/in English. To summarize thus far, sonorants are ranked as follows:

(3) Relative sonority of sonorant consonants

glides4a4flaps4laterals4trills4nasals.Concerning vowels, it was noted earlier that syllable weight effects provide evidence for dividing them into

different sonority groups based on their propensity for attracting stress. In Kobon, for example, stress

4At the surface level the flap [N] and the trilled [r] contrast in Spanish minimal pairs such as pero ‘but’ vs. perro ‘dog’. Harris (1983, 2002)

claims that the trill derives from an underlying geminate flap. However, not all authors agree with this (Bonet & Mascaro, 1997;

D’Introno, del Teso, & Weston, 1995). Harris’ analysis also contradicts the intuition of many native speakers, who consider [r] a phoneme

(Mike Piper, p.c.). Furthermore, some languages contrast a flap, a trill, and a geminate trill (Raymond & Parker, 2005); in such cases it is

not feasible to derive the trill from a geminate flap. Consequently, since everyone agrees that the phonetic manifestation of the

orthographic rr in Spanish is clearly a trill, the controversy concerning its phonological origin is largely orthogonal to this paper.5Thanks to a referee for pointing this out.


predictably falls on the most sonorous nucleus within a right-aligned disyllabic window, distinguishing fourclasses: /]/4/e o/4/i u/4/= X/ (Davies, 1980, 1981; de Lacy, 1997; Kenstowicz, 1997). Other languages showthat /=/ is more sonorous than /X/ (Bianco, 1996; de Lacy, 2002; Kenstowicz, 1997). Crucially, it is not the casethat /=/ is never stressed (unlike English); rather, in some of these languages /=/ does bear stress in the rightsituations: when it is the only vowel available and/or when it conflicts only with /X/ (Urbanczyk, 2006). Soperipheral vowels are more sonorous than central ones, and within each set lower vowels outrank their highercounterparts (Coetzee, 2006). Consequently, the comprehensive sonority scale at which we have arrived is thefollowing:

(4) Final hierarchy of relative sonority (for phonetic segments)
Low vowels 17 Mid peripheral vowels (not =) 16 High peripheral vowels (not X) 15 Mid interior vowels (=) 14 High interior vowels (X) 13 Glides 12 Rhotic approximants (a) 11 Flaps 10 Laterals 9 Trills 8 Nasals 7 Voiced fricatives 6 Voiced affricates 5 Voiced stops 4 Voiceless fricatives 3 Voiceless affricates 2 Voiceless stops 1
As mentioned above, the hierarchy in (4), which is assumed to apply at the level of surface allophones, ismotivated primarily by phonotactic constraints and productive phonological processes. Virtually everyranking in this scale (every pair of adjacent classes) has been justified by at least one explicit argument.Notably, no reference has been made at any point to phonetic (articulatory and/or acoustic) criteria as a basisfor these groupings, including intensity. It would make this section far too long to provide more in-depthevidence for specific details relating to different sonority hierarchies, natural classes, and rankings; the readeris referred to Parker (2002) and Cser (2003) for a much more thorough review of the relevant literature andcontroversies.

A final issue necessary to complete this discussion is to explain where [h] and [<] fit in the sonority scale.Many treatments of sonority ignore glottal consonants due to their inherent complications and divergentcross-linguistic behavior. Nevertheless, an adequate theory of sonority should be able to classify all speechsounds simultaneously. In this paper, [h] and [<] are considered obstruents, for several reasons. First, they areoften inserted as default onsets, where segments of low sonority (like [t]) are preferred due to the SonorityDispersion Principle (Lombardi 2002). Second, laryngeal consonants often pattern as allophones or variantsof prototypical obstruent phonemes. Also, in many languages, such as English and Quechua, glottalconsonants occur in syllable onsets but not in codas. This type of restriction is common among obstruents butmuch less frequent with sonorants, again because of the Sonority Dispersion Principle. Consequently, withrespect to the sonority hierarchy in (4), [h] will be considered a voiceless fricative and [<] a voiceless stop. Otherworks adopting this position include Heffner (1950), Ladefoged (1971), Lass (1976), Durand (1987), Zec(1988), etc. Cusco Quechua provides further phonological evidence that [<] is less sonorous than [h]: epenthetic[<] is preferred over [h] in onset position by the Sonority Dispersion Principle (Parker, 1997; Parker & Weber,1996). I note that one may disagree with this classification of [h] and [<] without affecting the hierarchy in (4);there is considerable independent evidence for the relative placement of other (supralaryngeal) stops andfricatives, regardless of where glottal consonants are assigned. And since /h/ is a phoneme in all threelanguages studied in this paper, it behooves us to include it somewhere in the sonority scale; as argued above,


the majority of the overall evidence favors treating it as a voiceless fricative (sonority index ¼ 3). So a strengthof this scale is its breadth in terms of the number of different types of segment classes it simultaneouslyencompasses. Indeed, no other sonority hierarchy, to my knowledge, is as comprehensive as this one.However, it is still not entirely exhaustive since a few important, yet rarer kinds of sounds are not discussedhere, most notably clicks and implosives. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this study it is not necessary to dealwith these; what really matters is that the scale in (4) can handle all of the contrastive segments of Spanish,Quechua, and English (cf. Section 4).

As observed above, it is widely debated whether the sonority hierarchy is universal or language-specific. Inpractical terms this might reduce to the issue of whether it is innate or learned. While these questions areimportant and interesting, they are beyond the scope of this paper and cannot be answered conclusively withdata from just three languages. Nevertheless, once we have shown that a split in sonority between two classessuch as, say, laterals and flaps, is necessary in one particular language, it seems reasonable to posit that it is atleast potentially available for other languages to exploit as well. Consequently, I assume here that formaldevices such as the Sonority Sequencing Principle can access the rankings in (4). So the experiment discussedlater can be seen as a test of a specific proposed hierarchy which is possibly universal. If correct, this scalewould be consistent with theories of Universal Grammar, but might also arise from more general perceptual,articulatory, and/or cognitive pressures, common to all humans, so the question of whether the sonorityhierarchy is innate is largely irrelevant.

At the same time, another prediction or claim which is strictly assumed in the ensuing discussion is that nolanguage should present reversals of the rankings in (4). This is a strong hypothesis in that it greatly limits thetypes of constraints and/or processes which can be attributed directly to sonority. It is therefore a desirabletheoretical assumption, but one which is likewise very difficult to prove. Nevertheless, much of the recent workon sonority agrees that its rankings are fixed and thus cannot be permuted (Alderete, 1995; Bat-El, 1996;Beckman, 1998; Davis, 1998; Gordon, 2005a; Gouskova, 2004; Rose, 2000). Of course, languages differ interms of which segments occur in their inventories and/or which (adjacent) categories in the sonority hierarchythey systematically distinguish, so there must be a way for the phonological component of the grammar toproduce these results. As de Lacy (2002, 2004) shows, it is possible to capture effects of markedness conflation(underdifferentiation of possible contrasts) without resorting to language-particular sonority scales orreversible sonority rankings.

As summarized above, sonority has been widely invoked to explain cross-linguistic phonological processes.Nevertheless, these phenomena raise an important question which has never been definitively answered, pace

Sievers: is there any coherent notion of sonority grounded in evidence external to the phonotactic facts thatsonority is assumed to account for? That is, what is the articulatory, acoustic, and/or perceptual source ofsonority in the speech signal? Not surprisingly, these issues have also inspired much disagreement concerningthe actual substance of sonority. Despite the work dedicated to this topic, the search for a reliable andmeasurable phonetic indicator of sonority has remained largely unfulfilled to this day. Partly for this reason,sonority is often claimed to be circular in nature (Kawasaki, 1982; Lass, 1984; Ohala, 1990b; Wright, 2004).Therefore, a convincing demonstration that sonority has a true physical basis would help dispel much of thedoubt.

At least 98 different correlates of sonority have been posited to date, documented in Parker (2002). This istoo many to discuss each one in detail, but some common themes will be reviewed. One major problem is thatvery few attempts have been made to confirm these proposals instrumentally. Nevertheless, the most commonapproach to defining sonority claims that it is correlated with openness (of the vocal tract) or (supralaryngeal)aperture (Bloomfield, 1914; Goldsmith, 1990; Howe & Pulleyblank, 2001; Jespersen, 1922; Kingston, 1998;Kirchner, 1998; Lass, 1984, etc.).6 In this regard Keating, Lindblom, Lubker, & Kreiman (1990, 1994) havecarried out important studies on jaw opening. We can also indirectly approximate this with F1 measurements(Donegan, 1978; Keating, 1983, 1988; Kingston, 1998), but while this works well for vowels in general, it ismore difficult to carry out with consonants, especially obstruents (Parker, 2002). This is because most

6The inverse claim is that sonority is the opposite of (supraglottal) narrowing, stricture, blockage, closure, impedance, etc. (Beckman,

Edwards, & Fletcher, 1992; Durand, 1990; Halle & Clements, 1983; Hume & Odden, 1996; Kenstowicz, 1994; Malmberg, 1963; Pike,

1954).


obstruents lack an inherent F1, so we must instead look at their effects on adjacent vowels rather thanmeasuring F1 within the consonants themselves, making for a complex and indirect comparison. Furthermore,a contradiction between F1 values (or openness) and sonority rank arises especially with [=]: it has a larger F1than the high peripheral vowels [i] and [u], yet it patterns as lower in sonority in terms of stress assignment.

Finally, sonority is often attributed to acoustic notions such as energy (Goldsmith, 1990; Keating, 1988;Ladefoged, 1971, 1975; Wright, 2004), power (Fletcher, 1929; Jones, 1960, 1966), force (Bloch & Trager, 1942;Bloomfield, 1933; Jakobson & Halle, 1968), etc. These proposals seem to offer the most promise in thatprevious work in this area has yielded some encouraging results, which will be discussed shortly. A similar,related correlate of sonority is inherent or perceived loudness (Bloomfield, 1914; Clements, 1990; Jones, 1960;Ladefoged, 1975, 1993; Laver, 1994; Selkirk, 1984), but this is really an auditory property best tested via aperceptual study, which is beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, the acoustic basis of loudness isintensity, and in fact several experiments have been carried out in this realm. Since they are similar to thepresent investigation, they merit a more detailed summary, which will be addressed in the next section.

3. Statement of hypothesis

The main claim tested in this paper is that the rank indices posited in (4) should be reflected in the acousticintensity values (relative sound levels) for all language-specific segments, as grouped into their respectivesonority classes, at least when other factors affecting intensity are kept constant, e.g., prosodic position.Instead of sound level, one could be more specific and distinguish sound pressure level, sound power level, andsound intensity level, but that is not necessary in this context since all of these are essentially the same whenquantified logarithmically in decibels. It would be beneficial to first review some previous studies on intensityand explain why none of them are ideal for the present purposes. Table 1 summarizes the obtained results,where each particular scale runs from highest relative sound level on the left to lowest on the right.

Table 1 shows that segmental sound levels in English and Spanish generally tend to follow the sonorityhierarchy fairly well. Nevertheless, each of these experiments has one or more problems which precludes themfrom serving as conclusive evidence to test the hypothesis proposed here. For example, the numbers whichLadefoged (1975, p. 270) provides are only estimates and thus involve, in his words, ‘‘a great deal ofguesswork.’’ Fry (1979) does not report the number of speakers or repetitions of each token, so we do notknow how robust his data are. Similarly, the values of Kennedy, Levitt, Neuman, and Weiss (1998) are basedon only one repetition by an unknown number of speakers. Furthermore, they only measure consonants, notvowels. Lavoie (2000) likewise only works with consonants, but we need the corresponding measurements forvowels to complete the hierarchy. In Parker (2002) the utterances were inadvertently digitized at 11 kHz, so thedata for segments with high frequency energy (sibilants) are suspect. Nevertheless, that study served as a pilotfor the present one, where this oversight is fixed.

Most of these previous studies report integrated RMS values averaged across entire phonemes. For thepresent purposes, however, a somewhat novel procedure will be employed. This paper, like Parker (2002),proposes that sonority be viewed phonetically as a sound level protrusion—peak sound level in vowels and

Table 1

Summary of previous experiments on sound levels

Author(s) Date Language Speakers Repetitions Sound level scale

Ladefoged 1975 English ? ? æ L o

A

I i l a m n w j s P f y h p t k

Fry 1979 English ? ? o L > L æ

A

e I i u w j a l P F m tP n W dW z s c t k v j b d f p yKennedy et al. 1998 English ? 1 F m n s z P d c j v b t k y p f

Lavoie 2000 English 5 men 5 a l n m j W v z dW d b c tP y P t s p f k

Lavoie 2000 Spanish 4 men 5 j E l n m r b j U N v x s tP p t f k

Parker 2002 English 4 men 3 u

A

o L > I e i e æ L = w a l j W m n v h z P s f j dW b c t tP d p k yParker 2002 English 4 women 3 u > e

A

I e o L æ L = i j w l a n m W v j h z P d dW b c s f t y p k tPParker 2002 Spanish 4 men 3 u e o > i w l N b j r n m U E b d c dW h s t k p f tPParker 2002 Spanish 4 women 3 o e u > i w l N r b n m E d b c j U dW h s f t tP k p


lowest sound level in consonants. While this procedure (sound level extrema) has the disadvantage of differenttypes of measures for consonants vs. vowels, and forces us to evaluate (correlate) sonority separately for thesetwo sound classes, it has several practical and theoretical advantages over integrated RMS values. Forexample, it highlights the basic speech dichotomy between periods of open resonance vs. silent obstruction.Also, mean values may be somewhat misleading for sounds with large acoustic transitions, such as glides anddiphthongs. Furthermore, since sound level extrema normally occur near the middle of segments, not at edges,the problem of parsing segment boundaries is virtually eliminated (this is true mainly of CVCV utterances; insome cases consonants in clusters may be problematic). This in turn reduces human interpretive decisions(errors), increases the steps that can be automated, and makes the process easier to replicate. The problem ofsegmenting the signal to measure mean sound levels is especially pernicious when speakers pause immediatelybefore or after a target voiceless stop; in such a situation it is impossible to calculate an average sound level.Mean values are also more easily affected by the quality of adjoining sounds, whereas the relevant sound levelextrema rarely occur at phoneme edges and are thus more likely to yield a characteristic value unbiased by thephonological context. Sound level extrema have the additional advantage of spreading out the values more(they separate the natural classes statistically), making it easier to achieve reliable differences between groups,whereas measuring mean sound levels produces a more compressed range on the decibel scale. Finally, soundlevel protrusions make it easier to capture the cross-linguistic similarity between phonologically relatednatural classes such as plain stops, aspirates, and ejectives, all of which have roughly equivalent minimumsound levels. Otherwise, in terms of mirroring the sonority hierarchy, mean values may be problematic forclicks and ejectives, which have a sharp sound level spike (Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996). Precedentsfor reporting extreme sound level values (vowel peaks) are Beckman (1986), Chiang and Chiang (2005), andLevi (2005).

Other conceivable methods for measuring sound levels in exactly the same way for vowels and consonantsrun into additional difficulties. For example, we might try using the criterion of peak relative sound levels forboth types of segments. However, the highest sound level of consonants will normally be right at their juncturewith adjacent vowels. This would incorrectly lead to roughly equal measurements for all consonants,regardless of their manner of articulation. The inverse would be true of vowels if we uniformly report soundlevel minima for both classes of sounds. Finally, RMS amplitude is also undesirable, and more complicated,for the reasons mentioned above. All things considered, then, the most convenient method for measuringsound levels is to record peaks for vowels and minima for consonants. The natural generalization which unitesthese two opposites is that each one constitutes a sound level protrusion or local extreme relative to thesurrounding environment.

4. Experimental design

4.1. Methods

I now discuss the general design and methodology of the experiment insofar as it was the same for the threelanguages studied. Language-specific details are noted in the corresponding subsections. The sample oflanguages examined here (Spanish, Quechua, and English) was chosen for two primary reasons. On thetheoretical side, this combination of languages contains a very large inventory of the most frequent phonemescross-linguistically. Consequently, we end up with at least one exemplar to test each of the 17 sonority classesposited in (4). On a more practical and logistical side, I have lived in close proximity to speakers of all threelanguages.

For the experiment, five male native speakers of each language were recorded in anechoic chambers.Subjects spoke into a head-mounted microphone (with foam covering) fixed at a distance of 1–200 to the side ofthe mouth. Target items were cued from written sheets. Speakers initially read through the language-particularlist one time each, without recording, to familiarize themselves with the frame sentence and substitution items(discussed below). The entire list of target words was pronounced five times by each speaker, pausing aftereach complete read through. So normally 25 tokens of each item were obtained per language. The order ofpresentation of the test words was randomized and counterbalanced across the five sheets. Subjects wererequested to speak at a relaxed, conversational speed, neither especially fast nor slow. They were also asked to


use a normal tone of voice, neither too loud nor soft. Live utterances were recorded directly onto digital mediaat 44.1 kHz and transferred to a PC for analysis.

4.2. Subjects

4.2.1. (Peruvian) Spanish

Five male native speakers of Spanish were recorded in Lima, Peru in 2005, with a Roland ED UA-30 USBaudio interface. Their ages were 37, 40, 40, 46, and 47. All subjects were born, raised, and are still living inLima, and did not present any noticeable dialect differences. Each of them also speaks English to some degree,but all aspects of the experiment were carried out exclusively in Spanish.

4.2.2. (Cusco) Quechua

The dialect of Quechua studied here is that spoken in and around Cusco, Peru. This variety is veryprestigious since Cusco was the capital of the Inca empire. It is also the largest Quechua dialect in Peru, with1,500,000 speakers according to Gordon (2005b). One of its interesting phonetic features is contrastiveaspirated and ejective stops. Five male native speakers of Quechua were recorded in Lima in 2005, using thesame booth and recording equipment described in Section 4.2.1 for Spanish. Their ages were 39, 42, 48, 48,and 59. All five are also fluent in Spanish. Since I do not speak Quechua, the metalanguage used to orient andinstruct the speakers was exclusively Spanish.

4.2.3. (American) English

Five male native speakers of English were recorded in 2005 at the Ukarumpa center of the Summer Instituteof Linguistics in Papua New Guinea, with a Roland VS-880EX digital studio workstation. Their ages were 25,30, 30, 31, and 35. All of them were born and raised in a midwestern state of the US, and did not present anynoticeable dialect differences.

4.3. Materials

4.3.1. Spanish

All phonemes of Peruvian Spanish were studied, plus a few important allophones. The phonological contentof the test items was carefully controlled to get the minimal contrasts possible. The 38 words and their glossesare listed in Appendix A. Most target segments occur in a word-initial syllable bearing primary lexical stress.Thus, for example, the five vowels appear in the context [0p_so]. Onset consonants occur in the environment[0_VCV], where both vowels are usually /]/ and the intervocalic segment is most often /t/.7 For example, /p/was measured in the word pata. In Spanish /N/ does not occur word-initially (cf. Section 2), so orate was usedto elicit the flap phoneme. Voiced obstruents are realized as stops after a (homorganic) nasal and continuantselsewhere (Lozano, 1978). Thus, given the frame sentence discussed below, word-initially we get a fricative, asin bata. To obtain voiced plosives, these would have to be placed in the second syllable of target words wherethe first syllable ends with a nasal, e.g., engana. However, this would confound our results since these segments(the voiced stop allophones) would be the only target onset consonants not occurring in intervocalic position.Since the segmental environment of this class of segments would therefore have to be different from the rest,they are not studied here so as to maintain a completely consistent and controlled phonotactic context. Thesephonemes are thus represented by their voiced continuant allophones [b j U], which are the canonical,prescriptively expected variants following a vowel, and are argued by some to be the basic underlying forms(e.g., Lozano, 1978). Most of the target coda consonants occur in the position [0V_CV], where the word-initialvowel is usually /]/ and the onset of the second syllable most often /t/, e.g., asta.

All of these test lexemes were embedded in the context Paco dijo ‘‘__’’ ayer ([0p]ko 0jiho ___ ]0jeN] ‘Paco(male name) said ‘‘___’’ yesterday’). This was chosen because it fixes an unstressed vowel right before and after

7In the literature there is a lack of clarity as to the exact nature of Cardinal Vowel 4 ([]]). Although it was intended to be a low front

vowel, in practice this symbol is often used to represent a low central segment. Following Peruvian traditions, []] is used in this paper for

the low central vowels of Spanish and Quechua.


the target words to avoid the effects of stress clash and consonant clustering. To control for randomfluctuations in loudness across speakers and tokens, the sound analyzed in each test word was normalized bycomparing it with the vowel /]/ of Paco in that same utterance. This reference point is ideal since it is thelowest vowel of the language and appears sentence-initially with primary lexical stress as well as pre-nuclearpitch accent, so it should establish a stable, maximum sound level underneath which all of the target phonescan fall. Thus the peak sound level of the /]/ in Paco in each token was subtracted from the sound levelextrema of the test segment measured in the same utterance (the maximum sound level of vowels and theminimum of consonants) to yield a relative value suitable for statistical analysis.

4.3.2. Quechua

Target words were pronounced in the carrier frame Pacon naha ‘‘___’’ nisharan ‘Paco was saying ‘‘___’’ a littlewhile ago’. This consists of /p]ko/ ‘male name’; /�n/ ‘personally witnessed (evidential)’; /n]h]/ ‘a while ago,previously, before’; /ni-/ ‘say’; /�P]/ ‘progressive’; /�N]/ ‘past (perfect); and /�n/ ‘third person generic’. Somespeakers say [0E]h]] instead of [0n]h]]; this should not affect the results here. Main word-level stress in Quechua isregularly penultimate. Analogous to []] in the Spanish word Paco, the /]/ of Pacon is the reference point forrelative sound level measurements in Quechua. All phonemic segments are contrasted in word-initial syllables withprimary lexical stress. As in Spanish (and English below), target words occur in a syntactic position where theynaturally receive phrasal stress (nuclear pitch accent) as well. Onset consonants occur in the context [0_VCV(C)],where the vowels are normally /]/ and the intervocalic consonant is most often /t/, like Spanish. This includesaspirates and ejectives (cf. Appendix B). /P/ does not appear word-initially. It is more difficult to find minimal pairsfor vowels since /e/ and /o/ historically occurred next to uvular stops only (Cusihuaman, 1976a, b; Mejıa Huaman,2001). Nevertheless, all five vowels occur in a word-initial stressed open syllable following /t/, e.g., [0titi], [0tuN]n],etc. Coda consonants appear in the environment [‘(C)V_CV], where the first vowel is always /]/ and the onset ofthe second syllable is /t/ whenever possible. In codas the dorsals /k/ and /q/ are often (optionally) lenited tofricatives ([x] and [w], respectively). No aspirates, ejectives, affricates, or /h/ may close a syllable in Cusco Quechua.8

4.3.3. English

Target words were read in the sentence frame Father saw ‘‘___’’ again. It was explained to each subject thatthis context should be understood as implying Father saw the word ‘‘___’’ written down somewhere again. Thereference point for sound level calculations is the />/ of father. This was selected to match Paco(n) in Spanishand Quechua. Other conceivable carrier phrases such as Father said ___ again are undesirable because then theinitial consonant of the substitution items would follow /d/ at the end of said. This would confound the resultshere since the points of minimal sound level of onset consonants would all be roughly equivalent to the valueat which /d/ terminates. In order to follow the same methodology as in Spanish and Quechua, the word rightbefore the target must end with a vowel (like dijo and naha) so that the following consonant is intervocalic.

The list of analyzed words appears in Appendix C. Most items are monosyllabic. Vowels are contrasted inthe environment [b_t], except for /

A

/ in put. Phonetic [=] appears in the first syllable of baton and [X] in the lastsyllable of batches. Obstruents occur in the onset position of [_Vn], where the vowel is front, usually /I/, e.g.,

%bin. Sonorant consonants are contrasted in may, ray, way, etc. Coda obstruents appear word-finally in [CV_],where the vowel is usually /æ/ and the initial consonant a nasal, e.g., na

%b. Coda sonorants also occur in [CV_],

where the vowel is low and the initial consonant a velar stop, i.e., ca , cam, etc.

4.4. Measurements

Sound level measurements were made with version 4.3.17 of Praat, using its default settings for intensitycalculations.9 These yielded a Gaussian-like 41.67ms analysis window and an automatic time step of 10.67ms.

8The phoneme /tP/ does occur syllable-finally in certain other varieties of Quechua, such as that spoken along the Huallaga River

(Weber, 1989, 1996). All of the target words described in this section (and listed in Appendix B), as well as their definitions in Spanish, are

found in Mejıa Huaman’s (2001) dictionary. Cusihuaman (1976a, b) was also consulted.9At times a sound level meter is used to calibrate the signal so as to report absolute sound pressure levels. This was not done here, but

rather every sound level measurement in this experiment was normalized by comparing it to a constant reference point (the vowel /]/) inthe same utterance, as described in Section 4.3.

ARTICLE IN PRESS

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119.308 119.377 119.445 119.514 119.582 119.65130

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A

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Fig. 1. Praat spectrogram of the sequence /os]/ of the Spanish sentence Paco dijo ‘‘sana’’ ayer, where points A and C are the approximate

initial and final boundaries of the /s/, and an individual sound level measurement is noted for the minimum intensity value at point B.

S. Parker / Journal of Phonetics 36 (2008) 55–9066

Praat’s documentation notes that these parameters are adequate for drawing reliable pitch, formant, andintensity contours (Boersma &Weenink, 2003). Viewing a waveform and wide band spectrogram, I selected onthe screen the portion of each target segment that included the sound level extreme—peak for vowels andminimum for consonants—being careful not to include in the selection the sound level protrusion of adjacentsegments. As described in Section 3, in virtually every case this was easy to do without identifying the preciselocation of phone boundaries. Once the sound level extreme of each target phoneme was selected in this way, acustom-written Praat script was run to automatically extract the corresponding sound level value in decibels.Fig. 1 illustrates this technique with a spectrogram of the segments /os]/ in the Spanish sentence Paco dijo

‘‘sana’’ ayer (‘Paco said ‘‘healthy’’ yesterday,’ cf. Section 4.3.1), with the Praat-generated intensity traceoverlaid.

In Fig. 1 the target segment is the /s/ of sana. Three key points of interest have been superimposed. In thisscreen the left edge of the selection window would be placed at about A, where the /o/ of dijo ends and the /s/ isbeginning. Note that the sound level trace here is descending from a peak during the /o/ into the followingconsonant. The right edge of the highlighted selection would be placed at approximately point C, where thesound level line is ascending at the juncture from the /s/ into the following vowel. Once this selection is made, aPraat function reports the sound level minimum for this consonant at point B. Crucially, all that matters isthat the sound level extreme at B be included within the selection area on the screen. In about 99% of the casesmeasured, points A and C can be moved 20–25ms earlier or later, and Praat will still return the sameminimum value for this token of /s/ at point B. This holds true not only for fricatives like /s/, but also fornearly all other classes of segments examined in this study, including /j/ and /w/. The intensity trace for atypical intervocalic approximant looks very similar on a spectrogram to that of the /s/ in Fig. 1, with a cleartrough in the interior of the segment. The main difference, in terms of sound levels, is that the trace for glidesdoes not dip down quite as far to reach its minimum value between the peaks of the adjacent vowels.

In order to fairly reflect the variable sound level contours in complex consonants, two or more minimumvalues are averaged together. For affricates, for example, the figures reported in Section 5 are the mean of twoindividual points: the lowest sound level during the occlusion and the minimum sound level of the sibilant release(normally at its onset). For aspirated stops (phonemic in Quechua and allophonic in English), the low pointduring the obstruction and the sound level minimum of the aspiration phase are averaged (usually right after theburst). Likewise, for ejective stops in Quechua, the values reported below are calculated as the mean of two

ARTICLE IN PRESS

121.174 121.231 121.289 121.346

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Fig. 2. Praat spectrogram of the sequence /]p’]/ of the Quechua sentence Pacon naha ‘‘p’ata’’ nisharan, where points A and B are

measured separately and then averaged together.

S. Parker / Journal of Phonetics 36 (2008) 55–90 67

minimum points, corresponding to the occlusion and the sound level spike accompanying the ejective release. Sofor aspirated and ejective affricates (/tPh/ and /tP’/) in Quechua, three minimal sound level values are averaged,measured during the stoppage, the sibilant, and the laryngeal function. This adjustment is made so as not toignore significant sources of sound level modulation during consonants involving complex articulatory andacoustic events.10 This technique is illustrated for an ejective stop in Fig. 2. The Quechua sentence Pacon naha

‘‘p’ata’’ nisharan means ‘Paco was saying ‘‘congregation’’ a little while ago’ (cf. Section 4.3.2).In Fig. 2 the target segment is the /p’/ of p’ata. In the spectrogram this is preceded by the final half of the

second vowel of naha and followed by the beginning of the first /]/ of p’ata. The initial step in analyzing thisejective is to select the whole screen visible in the figure. Praat then reports the sound level minimum of theentire consonant phoneme at point A, during the occlusion. This value should be comparable to the soundlevel minima of plain voiceless plosives, i.e., those without aspiration or glottalization, since both casescorrespond to a period of silence (cf. Section 5 below). Then the cursor is positioned at point B (the left edge ofa thin column of energy) and the glottalic release burst is highlighted up to point C (on the right edge). Asecond sound level minimum is noted for this phase of the segment. In this particular token, as in most others,this second sound level minimum is located at point B, but in a few ejective tokens the relative sound level at Cis lower than that of B. In Fig. 2 the maximum sound level spike right after C is slightly higher than that of thesurrounding vowels, and the minimum sound level at B is less than 2 dB below this. The two relevant soundlevel minima are then averaged together and reported as the final sound level value for this /p’/: the mean ofpoints A and B. In this figure there is another obvious sound level minimum, at point D, corresponding to thegap in time subsequent to the ejective release and before the onset of the following vowel. Nevertheless, nomeasurement is taken at this location, for two reasons: (1) it does not coincide with any significant articulatorygesture or acoustic event (it is transitional), and (2) since the relative sound level at this position is higher thanthat of point A, on the one hand, and lower than that of point B, on the other hand, and since these two soundlevel values (A and B) are already averaged together, adding a third, intermediate number (D) to this overallmean would have little effect on the final sound level measurement reported for this class of sounds (ejectives).

10In doing this we incur one of the disadvantages ascribed to RMS amplitude measurements in Section 3, by analogy: mean values may

be somewhat artificial for sounds with large acoustic transitions. However, affricates, ejectives, and aspirated stops clearly consist of

visibly discrete and segmentable phonetic stages, while glides and diphthongs do not. Also, in the Quechua results reported in Section 5.2,

the single points corresponding to the absolute minimum sound levels of laryngealized stops are noted as well, for the sake of comparison.


To summarize, the analysis of complex (aspirated and glottalized) segments employed here highlights twoimportant aspects of the speech wave: it first recognizes the physical substance which all types of voicelessstops share in common (plain, aspirates, and ejectives)—the sound level minima for these phonemes as a wholeshould be roughly equivalent to each other across the three classes, since all are measured during a silentocclusion phase. Second, it also takes into account an important source of sound level variation whichdistinguishes between them, by adding into the equation a second reading at the point most typical of theirdifferent manners of release. If this were not done, it could potentially be objected that a significant portion ofthe sound level profile of complex stops had been overlooked.

Finally, an alternative methodology that might be considered is to add together the two relevant sound levelminima rather than averaging them. However, summation in this case would result in very high sound levelvalues uncharacteristic of voiceless stops, making them more like sonorant consonants or even vowels.Averaging, on the other hand, yields an intermediate sound level value similar to what would be obtained if wehad calculated an integrated mean across the duration of entire phonemes. It must be acknowledged that themeasurement criterion used here for affricates, ejectives, and aspirated stops (averaging sound levels ratherthan summing) was chosen based on where these classes fall on the sonority hierarchy. However, this move isnot completely circular since it does in fact directly lead to some significant reversals when comparing soundlevel values and sonority indices. Specifically, as the results for Quechua will show (Section 5.2), the overallsound level values for ejectives and aspirates are higher than those of the plain affricate /tP/, contra theprediction of the sonority hierarchy posited in (4). To avoid this outcome, it would have been a simple matterto report only the absolute sound level minima of the laryngealized stops (during their occlusion) and ignorethe release phase, and then these segments would (correctly) pattern the same as plain plosives, at the bottomof the sound level scale. Nevertheless, as noted above, it seems prudent to include somewhere in the calculationthe higher intensity that is characteristic of their glottal burst, and averaging two values reflects this.Furthermore, this procedure yields final sound level values somewhat similar to those which would beobtained by measuring integrated means across entire segments, and this latter technique is undeniably onestandard method that is often used to report sound levels.

To close this section, a few comments need to be made about the relationship between pitch and the soundlevel values obtained here. A large measurement window (more than 40ms) suggests that there certainlyshould be some influence of F0 on the sound level results. Specifically, as noted in Section 4.3.2, the targetwords in all three languages are in a focused position and bear primary lexical stress as well as nuclear pitch

Time (s)

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[a] [a]

Fig. 3. Praat spectrogram of the Spanish sentence Paco dijo ‘‘paso’’ ayer, with intensity trace (above) and pitch trace (below).


accent. All of these factors are known to correlate with heightened intensity (Beckman, 1986; Fry, 1955; Ladd,1996). Consequently, given the position of the target vowels with respect to the overall intonation contour ofthe carrier sentences, we can expect very high absolute sound level values for them. However, the consistentreference segment (the first /]/) at the beginning of these frames often has a pre-nuclear accent as well, and thislargely offsets the (absolute) sound level values which are adjusted relative to it. This is illustrated in Fig. 3,showing the relationship between F0 and sound levels in the entire Spanish utterance Paco dijo ‘‘paso’’ ayer

(‘Paco said ‘‘step’’ yesterday’).In Fig. 3 the intensity trace is on top and the pitch tracking is underneath.11 The []]’s of Paco and paso have

been superimposed. Notice that these two segments exhibit the highest absolute sound level and F0 values inthis sentence. Furthermore, all syllables bearing lexical stress tend to correspond to local relative peaks of bothsound level and pitch. As we will now see, the largest obtained sound level value for any of the testedphonemes in all three languages is just .8 dB in total for all of the /]/’s of paso (above the /]/ of Paco). Thepotential effect of pitch on intensity measurements will be further discussed in footnote 17.

5. Results

This section presents the final obtained sound level values for each of the target segments, organized bylanguage. Each language-specific table is accompanied by a brief discussion of some general aspects of thedata it displays, without focusing specifically on sonority. Then in Section 6 the question of how well theseresults align with the sonority hierarchy is analyzed systematically and in depth.

5.1. Spanish

Table 2 presents the obtained sound level values for Spanish, as described in Section 4.3.1. In thephonological literature it is generally agreed that individual consonants do not differ in relative sonority basedonly on supralaryngeal place of articulation, such as /p/ vs. /t/ vs. /k/ (Parker, 2002). While a few studies dopropose a difference in ‘‘strength’’ between, e.g., /i/ and /u/ (Hooper, 1976), this is usually for diachronic andlanguage-specific reasons (Foley, 1970) and has not been shown to be necessary for the description ofsynchronic processes and universal patterns that make reference to sonority. Consequently, natural groups ofsegments such as /m n E/ and /e o/ are not analyzed here individually but rather combined into thecorresponding classes from the final sonority hierarchy posited in (4), whenever possible.12 These categories ofsounds are listed in Table 2 from the highest sound level values to the least, distinguishing between threegeneral classes according to their prosodic position in the respective elicitation items: syllable-initialconsonants, vowels, and syllable-final consonants. Starting in the second column of Table 2 I give thesegment(s) in each class, the mean sound level of the group (in decibels above or below the /]/ of Paco), thetotal number of tokens contributing to the mean value, and the standard deviation. In the column immediatelyto the left of each segment or natural class is its sonority index from the scale in (4).

In Table 2 there are no data for glides, trills, or affricates in coda position since these consonants do notoccur syllable-finally in Spanish (in prescriptive speech). Right below the column of coda consonants is a rowlabeled nonphonemic segments. This is to inform the reader that [F] is not a contrastive sound of Spanish but israther predictably derived from /n/ in syllable-final position. This is why it does not appear among the set ofonset consonants. As indicated in Appendix A, it was elicited in the word anca. Also, [b j U] are allophones of/b d c/ (Section 4.3.1). In the next two tables some nonphonemic segments of Quechua and English will belisted and described as well. At the bottom of Table 2 (underneath the row of allophonic segments) is a displayof those obtained sound level rankings which reverse the prediction of the sonority hierarchy, along with theresults of a significance test for each such pair. These will be further explained in Section 6.

11The frequency scale of the spectrogram could not be fit into Fig. 3, but it is the same as that of Figs. 1 and 2: it ranges from 0 to

5000Hz.12Nevertheless, for the sake of comparison the results for each separate segment are given in appendices. These are discussed in

Section 7.

ARTICLE IN PRESS

Table 2

Sound level extremes of Spanish segment classes (in dB), relative to the /]/ of Paco, including results of statistical tests for sonority

reversals (a ¼ .05)

Sonority index (SI) Onset consonants Vowels

Segments Mean n s.d. SI Segments Mean n s.d.

9 l �5.1 25 2.1 17 ] .8 25 1.3

10 N �6.3 25 2.4 16 e o .8 50 1.8

12 j w �7.6 42 3.2 15 i u �1.4 50 2.1

7 m n E �8.4 74 3.2 Coda consonants

8 r �10.1 25 2.0SI Segments Mean n s.d.6 b j U �13.1 75 6.0

7 m n E F �13.9 95 3.03 f s h �26.2 75 4.8

10 N �16.0 25 6.12 tP �33.2 25 3.1

9 l �19.5 25 6.81 p t k o �45.5 74 4.9

6 b j U �21.8 75 9.8

3 f s h �29.7 75 6.5

1 p t k o �36.4 74 5.2

Nonphonemic segments Nonphonemic segments

/b d c/ - [b j U] /n/ - [F], /b d c/ - [b j U]

Significant sonority reversals Significant reversals

l4j w t(64) ¼ 3.94, p ¼ .000 m n E F4l t(26) ¼ 4.04, p ¼ .000

m n E4r t(67) ¼ 3.30, p ¼ .002

Nonsignificant reversals Nonsignificant reversals

l4N t(47) ¼ 1.91, p ¼ .062 m n E F4N t(27) ¼ 1.71, p ¼ .099

N4j w t(62) ¼ 1.95, p ¼ .055


In Table 2, the mean sound level peak of /]/ (.8 dB) is equivalent to that of /e o/, but this is due to roundingvalues of .82 for /]/ and .76 for /e o/ to the nearest decimal point. However, since all other sound level valuesin these tables are rounded off to just one decimal, /]/ will be considered tied with the class /e o/. Anothernoteworthy detail is that within each consonant hierarchy (onset and coda), the group [b j U] has the higheststandard deviation. This reflects the well-known fact that these three segments in Spanish are voicedcontinuants, but not necessarily fricatives. That is, in some tokens for many speakers they are actually realizedas approximants rather than spirants, due to lenition (Lavoie, 2000). Nevertheless, they are treated here asobstruents (sonority index ¼ 6) since in Spanish syllables they can precede liquids in a complex onset, just like/p t k f/ (Harris, 1983). Another interesting generalization is that most of the classes of coda consonants havelower relative sound level values than their onset counterparts, the lone exception being voiceless stops. Thismay also be a natural effect of lenition in syllable-final position.

Finally, a word of clarification about the voiceless stops /p t k/: as noted by two reviewers, it is clear thattheir observed sound level values do not represent the minimum level possible. If the amplitude of the signal isdifferent from 0 during the occlusion phase, this can only be due to one of two sources: natural or artificial(machine-generated) background noise, or a measurement window that includes more than the occlusionduration. From a signal-processing point of view, the minimum sound level measured in stops can depend onthe details of the algorithm used to calculate intensity. Specifically, intensity is a smoothed version of thesquared signal, and the shape and width of the smoothing function are important because they relate to thesize of the analysis window and can affect how intensity is calculated. Essentially, when computing the soundlevel in a nearly silent region, the tails of the smoothing function may overlap nearby louder regions. A widersmoothing window will have more overlap with the nearby loud regions and thus result in a larger measuredsound level. When the real amplitude is exactly 0, the relative sound pressure will have a theoretical value of


minus infinity. For this reason, one reviewer suggests prefixing the sound level values of voiceless stops with alesser than sign in these tables, to call attention to this detail. The mean sound level values listed above for /p tk/ are the minima reported by Praat’s automated function, as described in Section 4.4. For the purposes of thispaper, the only crucial characteristic of the relative sound levels of voiceless stops is that we expect them to belower than those of all other segment types, in accordance with the prediction of the sonority hierarchy in (4).This in fact does turn out to be true, in all three languages, even with the limitations of our measurementmethod and/or background noise.

5.2. Quechua

The corresponding results for Quechua are summarized in Table 3. Recall that each sound level value iscompared with the /]/ of Pacon in the same utterance. Quechua has no voiced obstruents, and /h/, /tP/,aspirates, and ejectives do not occur syllable-finally, while /P/ appears in codas but not word-initially(cf. Section 4.3.2 and Appendix B).

In Quechua the velar and uvular nasals are allophonic since they do not occur in onsets, nor do theycontrast in codas (they appear only before homorganic stops). Nevertheless, including these as separatecategories allows for a more direct and exhaustive comparison of the Quechua results with those of Spanishand English. The dorsal fricatives [x] and [w] are not underlying either; rather, they are optionally derived from/k/ and /q/ in syllable-final position (Section 4.3.2 and Appendix B). This is why the number of tokens of thefour coda plosives [p t k q] is much lower than 100, which would otherwise be expected.

Two general aspects of these data are noteworthy. First, the standard deviations for the consonants (bothonsets and codas) are higher than those of the vowels, indicating more variability. The same is true of Spanish

Table 3

Sound level extremes of Quechua segment classes (in dB), relative to the /]/ of Pacon, including results of statistical tests for sonority


Sonority index (SI) Onset consonants Vowels


9 l h �12.7 50 5.7 17 ] .7 25 2.1

12 j w �13.5 50 5.7 16 e o .7 50 2.2

10 N �14.2 25 7.8 15 i u .1 50 3.1

7 m n E �16.3 75 6.7 Coda consonants3 s h �28.9 49 6.9

SI Segments Mean n s.d.2 tPh �32.2 23 4.3

10 N �10.2 25 4.92 tP’ �32.7 25 4.8

12 j w �11.7 50 4.61 p

hthkhqh�35.8 81 4.9

9 l h �15.6 50 4.81 p’ t’ k’ q’ �35.8 96 5.4

7 m n E F N �17.3 124 4.62 tP �41.1 25 3.0

3 s P x w �26.1 87 6.31 p t k q o�52.3 99 6.1

1 p t k q o�34.7 43 7.2

Nonphonemic segments

/n/-[F], /n/-[N]

/k/-[x], /q/-[w]


ph th kh qh4tP t(66) ¼ 6.41, p ¼ .000 None

p’ t’ k’ q’4tP t(68) ¼ 6.45, p ¼ .000


l h4j w t(98) ¼ .74, p ¼ .461 N4j w t(46) ¼ 1.30, p ¼ .199

l h4N t(37) ¼ .86, p ¼ .396


(Table 2). Second, all of the onset consonants have lower mean values than those of the corresponding Spanishnatural classes, some by almost 8 dB, although no obvious reason for this difference suggests itself at this time.It bears repeating how the sound level minima for the noncontinuant obstruents are calculated here. The meangroup values for the aspirated and ejective stops in Table 3 (tied at �35.8 dB) are significantly higher than thatof the plain stops (�52.3). This is because the sound level minima of the laryngealized varieties are the averageof two values: the absolute lowest value of the phoneme during the occlusion phase, and the point of minimumsound level during the glottalic function (the aspiration or ejective spike). Obviously, if only the absolutesound level minima of aspirates and ejectives were reported, these would have much lower values in Table 3,roughly analogous to that of plain /p t k q/ (in fact both of them are �52.7). Similarly, /tP/ is analyzed byaveraging the sound level minima of the two individual parts, [t] and [P], and the aspirated and glottalizedaffricates /tPh/ and /tP’/ consist of the mean of three sound level values (cf. Section 4.4). To reiterate, thisprocedure is followed so as not to ignore the articulatory and acoustic differences which distinguish plainplosives from their more complex counterparts, as well as stops from affricates. For example, in terms of thefour ejective stops /p’ t’ k’ q’/, their peak sound level value has a mean of �13.4 dB below the /]/ of Pacon,which is roughly the same as the sound level minimum of the glides /j w/ in onset position (�13.5). So this isclearly a significant contributor to the sound level profile of these segments that should not be overlooked. Asdiscussed in conjunction with Fig. 2 (Section 4.4), the sound level minimum of the ejective burst normallyprovides a very close approximation to this value.

5.3. English

Recall that the English sound level data are computed relative to the />/ of father (Section 4.3.3). Also, inword-initial position, /p t k/ and /tP/ are predictably (phonetically) aspirated, so their sound level values arethe mean of two minimal points for [ph], etc., and three points for [tPh], as described in Section 4.4 for theirQuechua counterparts. The procedure of treating the surface realization of English /tP/ as aspirated is adoptedhere because many accounts of English phonology specifically include /tP/ along with /p t k/ when listingwhich onset consonants undergo the process of allophonic aspiration in stressed syllables, especially word-initially (Falk, 1978). Furthermore, in positing the corresponding formal rule to capture this generalization,the natural class of input segments is often expressed with features that implicitly include affricates, such as[–cont, –voice] (Fromkin & Rodman, 1998). Also, in syllable onsets the pronunciation of English /tP/ soundsvery much like that of the Quechua aspirated /tPh/, so its value below includes a third sound level measurementtaken during the release phase.

In Table 4, the vowel [=] is considered a reduced allophone of all other vowels in unstressed positions. It waselicited in the first syllable of baton. The other nonphonemic vowel is [X], which can be analyzed as epentheticin the second syllable of the word batches (cf. Section 4.3.3 and Appendix C). Given that both of these vowelsare unstressed in English (and [X] occurs in a noninitial syllable as well), their prosodic environment is differentfrom that of all other vowels studied here. Consequently, in Table 4 their values have been placed inparentheses to reflect their exceptional status. They are listed here for comparison and to be exhaustive; theimportance of these different prosodic positions will be further discussed in subsequent sections. The nasal [F]is also classified here as an allophone of /n/ in syllable codas, even though its phonological origin is reallyirrelevant to its sound level measurements. Unlike Spanish and Quechua, several of the consonantal standarddeviations are lower than those of some of the vowels. The overall range of sound levels is also morecompressed, the lowest level being �27.8 for the voiceless stops in coda position.

6. Analysis

We now examine the observed sound level data from the three languages with respect to the question ofhow well they match up with the sonority hierarchy assumed in this paper. For every pairwise comparison inTables 2–4 which (potentially) reverses the expected sonority ranking, a t-test was carried out on the two meanvalues, using an a level of .05 for rejecting the null hypothesis. The results are displayed at the bottom of thosetables, grouping the reversals according to whether or not they are significant, and whether they involve onsetor coda consonants. The presentation in this section will be split into three general categories: onset

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Table 4

Sound level extremes of English segment classes (in dB), relative to the />/ of father, including results of statistical tests for sonority


Sonority

index (SI)

Onset consonants Vowels


9 l �11.8 25 2.9 17 æ > .3 49 2.1

11 a �13.6 25 2.9 16 e e L o L �.1 125 2.1

7 m n �13.7 50 1.7 15 i I u

A

�2.3 100 3.9

12 j w �13.8 50 3.3 (14) (=) (�4.6) (24) (2.5)

6 v j z W �17.2 100 4.2 (13) (X) (�8.3) (25) (3.2)

5 dW �19.6 25 2.3Coda consonants

4 b d c �21.1 75 4.2

SI Segments Mean n s.d.3 f y s P h �21.1 125 6.2

11 a �7.5 25 5.0

2 tPh �21.4 25 2.3

9 l �8.4 24 6.2

1 phthkh o�23.9 74 3.0

7 m n F �14.8 75 3.9

6 v j z W �19.1 101 4.2

5 dW �19.2 25 2.6

4 b d c �19.8 75 3.7

2 tP �22.4 25 3.6

3 f y s P �22.7 100 5.2

1 p t k o�27.8 75 5.0

Nonphonemic segments

[e], [X], /n/-[F]


l4a t(48) ¼ 2.16, p ¼ .036 None

l4j w t(54) ¼ 2.70, p ¼ .009


a4j w t(55) ¼ .34, p ¼ .737 (a4X) t(41) ¼ .59, p ¼ .559

m n4j w t(74) ¼ .33, p ¼ .743 tP4f y s P t(53) ¼ .31, p ¼ .758


consonants, coda consonants, and vowels. After each of these is laid out in turn, the results are then evaluated inSection 6.4 in terms of overall statistical correlations and their degrees of significance. As we will now see, codaconsonants in general match the proposed sonority scale better than onsets do, in all three languages. In thefinal discussion in Section 7 an alternative hypothesis will be considered, by which onset and coda consonantsare combined into a single hierarchy for the purpose of correlation with the respective sonority indices.

6.1. Onset consonants

6.1.1. Spanish

Focusing on the onset consonants in Table 2, it is noteworthy in the first place that all of the sonorants havehigher sound level values than all of the obstruents, as expected. Among the sonorants in particular, the glides/j w/ as a class have a lower mean sound level minimum than the liquids /l/ and /N/. As indicated at the bottomof the table, this sonority reversal is significant at the .05 level in the case of /l/4/j w/ (p ¼ .000) but not quitefor /N/4/j w/ (p ¼ .055), whose mean sound levels are closer together (�6.3 vs. �7.6). A possible explanationfor both of these outcomes is the well-documented tendency of Spanish approximants to harden and becomemore obstruent-like in onsets (Harris, 1969; Lavoie, 2000; Lozano, 1978). This would naturally lower theirsound level values. The phonological motivation for this process is the Sonority Dispersion Principle,


discussed in Section 2: in syllable-initial position high-sonority consonants such as glides are dispreferred infavor of low-sonority segments. Fortition of this type is not uncommon cross-linguistically. For example, itoccurs in Inapari as well, where /j/ can optionally be realized as [W] or [dW] (Parker, 1999). In other words,strengthening is potentially a gradient phenomenon, and while /j w/ are still sonorants in Spanish at thephonemic level, phonetically they may be relatively ‘‘hard’’ compared to these sounds in other languages.

Among the liquids, the lateral /l/ also has a greater sound level value than the flap /N/ in onset position,against the basic prediction of this paper. However, this reversal is not significant, and a likely explanation isthat /N/ does not occur word-initially in Spanish, so it was elicited in the word orate (recall from Section 4.3.1)./l/, on the other hand, can be initial, as in the word lata listed in Appendix A. While both /N/ and /l/ thus occurin syllables bearing primary stress, /l/ is also word-initial, while /N/ is not. It is well known that segments inroot and/or word-initial syllables tend to be articulated more forcefully than their noninitial counterparts(Beckman, 1998; Keating, Cho, Fougeron, & Hsu, 2003, cf. Sections 4.3.2 and 4.4).13 This prosodic differencemay provide a little extra emphasis for the /l/ in this case, enough to increase its sound level relative to the /N/in the second syllable of orate, accounting for this reversal. In coda position, in comparison, the flap iscorrectly more intense than the lateral when both occur in word-initial syllables (/]Nt]/ vs. /]lt]/; cf. AppendixA; see Section 6.2.1 too).

The final reversal (also significant) in this set of onset data involves the nasals and the trilled /r/. Thisparticular case may be a sample-specific phenomenon. In a previous study summarized in Table 1, /r/ has ahigher sound level minimum than the nasals for both male and female speakers of Spanish (Parker, 2002).Otherwise the nasals do correctly pattern as the lowest sonorants in Table 2.

To finish the onset consonants, the four classes of obstruents follow the sonority scale exactly as expected.Even though the obtained sound level of the voiced continuants [b j U] (�13.1) is quite a bit higher than thatof the voiceless fricatives (perhaps due to lenition; cf. Section 5.1), [b j U] as a group still fall below all of thesonorants. Recall that voiced plosives occur after nasals but not after vowels, so they are not studied here(cf. Section 4.3.1).

6.1.2. Quechua

Returning to the Quechua onset data in Table 3, once again the values of all sonorant consonants are higherthan those of all obstruents. Among the sonorants, the laterals /l h/ incorrectly outrank the glides /j w/ and theflap /N/, as they did in Spanish, but in Quechua neither of these reversals is significant. Also, the glides comeout above /N/, as predicted by the sonority hierarchy. The nasals coincide with the sonority scale too in fallingbelow the other sonorants but above all obstruents. So the only class of sonorants which are out of place arethe laterals.

Among the obstruents, the fricatives /s h/ are (correctly) higher than all affricates and stops, even with theadjustments made for the laryngealized variants as discussed previously. Furthermore, all three types ofaffricates (/tP/, /tPh/, and /tP’/) have higher values than their stop counterparts. The only significant sonorityreversals among onset consonants involve the glottalized and aspirated stops having higher group means thanthe unmodified /tP/. This assumes that laryngealized stops have the same sonority index as plain voicelessplosives, namely 1. This is the position adopted here, for the sake of being exhaustive (including all manners ofarticulation in the sonority hierarchy) and consistent (recognizing the basic substance which these naturalclasses share in common). Obviously, if the sound level minima during the release phase of aspirated andejective stops were stripped away such that only the absolute minimum values during the occlusion (�52.7)were listed above, there would no longer be a sonority reversal when comparing /ph th kh qh/ and /p’ t’ k’ q’/with /tP/. However, in that case it might be claimed that the technique for measuring sound level extremes inthis experiment was circular in nature because it was biased in favor of obtaining higher correlations with thesonority hierarchy. Hence while the ranking of /ph th kh qh/ and /p’ t’ k’ q’/ over /tP/ in Table 3 is considered asonority reversal here, there is a very natural explanation for it, given the procedures for calculating sound

13The type of fortition discussed in this paragraph is phonetic in nature, whereas an alternation between /j/ and [W] or [dW], as driven by

the Sonority Dispersion Principle, is phonological, even though its effects may be gradient. A key insight of Optimality Theory (Prince &

Smolensky, 1993) is that grammars consist of a set of constraints which interact with each other and can possibly conflict in the evaluation

of some words.


levels used in this paper. Furthermore, even when the sound level of the glottal release is included for theselaryngealized segments, their final obtained value of �35.8 dB still places them squarely among the obstruentson the resulting scale; they come out well below all sonorants, and beneath the fricatives too. So except foraspirates and ejectives, all obstruents pattern as expected.

6.1.3. English

With respect to the onset consonants in Table 4, the glides are incorrectly lowest of all sonorants, butstatistically they are nondistinct from /a/ and the nasals /m n/. Indeed, only 0.2 dB separates these three classesof segments in that table. The two significant reversals involve /l/ outranking /a/ and /j w/. In coda position,however, /l/ is lower than /a/, as the sonority hierarchy predicts (Section 6.2.3). Furthermore, in a previousstudy involving four other male English speakers, the expected outcome was obtained for these consonants:/j w/4/a/4/l/ (Parker, 2002). The six groups of syllable-initial obstruents align perfectly with theircorresponding sonority indices, with one minor glitch: the voiced stops and voiceless fricatives tie at �21.1 dB.

6.2. Coda consonants

6.2.1. Spanish

Among the syllable-final segments in Table 2, the relative rankings of the sonorants are slightly problematic,although the flap /N/ correctly has a higher value than /l/, and the nasals and /N/ are not reliably distinct.Nevertheless, the reversal of [m n E F] over /l/ is significant and deserves comment. No good explanationsuggests itself, but this outcome may also be a quirk of the sample since the correct coda sound level rankings/l/4nasals and /N/4nasals were obtained in Parker (2002) with different Spanish speakers, both men andwomen. (Those results are not shown in Table 1 since only onset consonants are displayed there.)Furthermore, in initial position, as we have seen, the nasals do come out below /l/ and /N/ (Section 6.1.1), andin Quechua and English all liquids outrank nasals too, in both slots of the syllable (Tables 3 and 4). Finally,the three types of Spanish obstruent codas perfectly concur with the prediction of the sonority hierarchy, sothe only segments out of place in this data set are the nasals.

6.2.2. Quechua

In coda position (Table 3) the laterals, nasals, fricatives, and stops are all in the expected order. In fact, theonly syllable-final segment which does not comply with the prediction is the flap /N/: it is higher than /j w/, butnot significantly. I do not have a good explanation for this result, but do note that in onsets the flap correctlyemerges below the glides. So a very important outcome is that the obtained scale of sound level values forQuechua codas involves no significant reversals when compared with sonority ranks. Another commentconcerning /j w/ in Quechua is that while these do not exhibit the highest values among all consonants in eitherinitial or final position of the syllable, neither are they reliably distinct from the topmost segments in those twosub-hierarchies.

6.2.3. English

Among English codas all of the sonorant classes are in the predicted order, with /a/ at the top of the scale.Furthermore, the lone sonority reversal among obstruents is nonsignificant (/tP/ slightly outranks /f y s P/). Soa crucial result once again is the lack of reliable reversals among consonants in syllable-final position, asobserved for Quechua in the preceding section.

6.3. Vowels

Among the sample of languages analyzed in this paper, the segmental inventories invariably contain fewervowels than consonants. Consequently, the discussion in this section will be more brief.

6.3.1. Spanish

The class of high vowels /i u/ correctly exhibits a lower mean relative sound level peak (�1.4) than the otherthree vowel phonemes. At the same time this value is higher than that of all Spanish consonants, as expected.


Among these the closest competitor is the onset /l/ at �5.1 dB. The low vowel /]/ and the mid-class /e o/tie at .8 dB, so while these do not confirm the predicted sonority ranking, neither do they reverse it. The factthat this obtained sound level is slightly higher than the peak of the /]/ in Paco is probably due to the syntacticfocus (nuclear pitch accent) on the target items in the carrier frame, as explained in Sections 4.3.1, 4.3.2,and 4.4.

6.3.2. Quechua

The Quechua vowels are quite analogous to their Spanish counterparts. Both languages contain the same(unmarked) five vowel system, and the statistical patterns observed for them here are very similar. Once again/]/ and the class /e o/ tie (at .7 dB), and the value for /i u/ is a bit lower than this. Furthermore, the relativesound levels of all consonants are beneath that of /i u/ (.1 dB).

6.3.3. English

In English the rank order of the vowel natural classes in Table 4 mirrors the sonority scale perfectly,including the unstressed segments [=] and [X]. However, in this case there is not a clean break between vowelsand sonorant consonants: the sound level of coda /a/ at �7.5 dB is higher than that of [X] (�8.3), although thedifference is not significant. A natural explanation for this reversal is the difference in the phonological contextof [X] as noted above, since /a/ does occur in an initial stressed syllable in car (Appendix C). Nevertheless, thisoutcome is still listed in the table as a nonsignificant reversal, but parenthesized to call attention to its unusualnature. Ideally a more crucial test of the hypothesis would be to measure /X/ in a language in which it can bestressed (Section 2).

6.4. Summary correlations

This section formally evaluates the goodness of fit or match up between the obtained sound level valuesin Tables 2–4 and the proposed sonority indices from (4), by means of overall statistical correlations.The inferential test that will be used is Spearman’s r. Pearson’s r is normally invoked when two data seriesare of analogous types. In this case, however, they are not: the sound level values are continuous in naturesince they can in principle range freely and involve decimal points, whereas the sonority indices are discretein that they are a priori limited to whole integers on an ordinal scale with upper and lower limits.Consequently, r is not entirely appropriate in this situation. Spearman’s r, on the other hand, avoids thisproblem by computing the correlation with a different formula based on rank orders within the lists of values.In practical terms r and r normally yield coefficients within a few percentage points of each other for agiven set of data. Most statistical packages, including the SPSS program used here, automatically perform thesteps necessary to calculate r when fed the raw values. Note that, with respect to the sound level resultsreported in Section 5, r is a conservative procedure in the sense that it penalizes nonsignificant sonorityreversals just as much as significant ones, treating them in exactly the same way in assigning rank orders. Thus,if this statistic is biased at all with respect to the main premise of this paper, it is biased against it, not in itsfavor.

In calculating r for the data from Tables 2–4, three separate hierarchies are evaluated for each language:onset consonants, coda consonants, and vowels. Given the different techniques for measuring soundlevels (peaks for vowels and minima for consonants), it would not be appropriate to combine both types ofsegments together on a single scale. Similarly, consonants should be separated by syllabic position to controlfor any prosodic effects, although in the next section we will explore the implications of grouping onsets andcodas together. For the purpose of correlation, all three classes of stops in Quechua (plain, aspirated, andejective) are assigned a sonority index of 1, as discussed in Section 6.1.2. Similarly, the three (voiceless)affricates are all ranked at level 2. The English vowels [=] and [X] are left out of that correlation due to theiranomalous phonological status (lack of stress). The results of the correlation tests are listed in Table 5. Thenine groups of segments are presented in the same order in which they were discussed in the preceding sections.From left to right the table displays the number of pairs of data points entering into each category’scorrelation (sound level value+sonority index), the obtained value of r, and the corresponding two-tailedp-value.

ARTICLE IN PRESS

Table 5

Obtained correlations (with Spearman’s rho) between the sonority indices in (4) and the observed relative sound level values in Tables 2–4

Group of segments n r P

Spanish onsets 9 .92 .001

Quechua onsets 11 .90 .000

English onsets 10 .91 .000

Spanish codas 6 .83 .042

Quechua codas 6 .94 .005

English codas 9 .98 .000

Spanish vowels 3 .87 .333�

Quechua vowels 3 .87 .333�

English vowels 3 1.00 .000

�Not significant at a ¼ .05.


The nine correlations in Table 5 range from a low of .83 to a high of 1.00, with an overall average of .91.14

Seven of the nine are significant at the .05 level, including all of the consonant sets. Two of the vowelcorrelations (Spanish and Quechua) are nonsignificant. An obvious possibility is that this latter outcomesimply results from a lack of correlation between these two vowel systems and their sonority ranks. However,it is more likely due in great part to the sound level ties between /]/ and /e o/, as well as the small number ofdata points compared in each case (n ¼ 3).15 Note that the obtained correlations for Spanish and Quechuavowels (r ¼ .87) are actually higher than that observed for Spanish codas (.83), but the latter is based on sixpairs of numbers and thus has a smaller p value (.042). Recall that the other two coda scales (Quechua andEnglish) involve no significant sonority reversals (Sections 6.2.2 and 6.2.3), so it is not surprising that theyexhibit the highest correlations among all of the consonant groups (.94 and .98, respectively). In addition, theEnglish vowels yield a perfect correlation of 1.00 because the rank order of their sound level values follows thesonority hierarchy exactly, without any reversals or ties. As mentioned above, the exceptional segments [=] and[X] were left out of this particular test, but even if they are included the obtained value of r remains 1.00 sincethe five sound level class values all monotonically decrease. So in the long run the different prosodiccharacteristics of these two sounds do not matter for the purposes of this section, i.e., they do not affect theobserved correlations in either direction.

7. Discussion

In the preceding sections we have tested sound level protrusions as physical correlates of sonority withextensive data on most of the phonetic segments from three languages, and observed very robust fits. Whilethe match up is not perfect, we have come closer than previous attempts, and done so under strictexperimental conditions. To summarize the overall results, at the major junctures between vowels andsonorant consonants on the one hand, and sonorants vs. obstruents on the other hand, there are no overlaps,i.e., no significant sonority reversals. Within the vowel natural classes there are no sonority reversals at all inany language, just two ties. In general the obstruents also conform well to the predetermined sonority indices.Most of the problems are with the sonorant consonants.16 In particular, the glides /j w/ tend to come out lowerthan expected in the data sets where they occur, perhaps due to hardening, although more than half of theirmisrankings are statistically unreliable. At the same time, there is also a trend for laterals to surface too high inthe obtained sound level hierarchies, especially in onset position (in codas they are well-behaved). Similarly tothe glides, however, three of the six reversals involving laterals are not significant. Furthermore, of the sixcases when laterals are too high, three times it is because /j/ and /w/ are concomitantly too low. So these two

14If only the absolute minimum sound level values of aspirated and ejective stops (�52.7) were used in these correlations, without

including the glottalic release spike (as discussed in Section 5.2), the obtained value of r for Quechua onsets would increase to .96.15To illustrate, if the relative sound level value of Spanish /]/ were just 0.1 dB higher (.9 instead of .8), the correlation would increase to

1.0. The same is true of Quechua.16Why this should be the case is not clear and merits further investigation.

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-54 -51 -48 -45 -42 -39 -36 -33 -30 -27 -24 -21 -18 -15 -12 -9 -6 -3

relative sound level (dB)

sonority

index

Spanish

Quechua

English

Fig. 4. Scatter plot of sonority indices and relative sound level values for onset consonant natural classes (taken from Tables 2–4).


natural classes are obviously interacting with each other in a potentially important way. We have thusidentified a specific type of recalcitrant segment (approximants) which should be focused on in subsequentresearch in an attempt to resolve the difficulties encountered here. Nevertheless, while none of the six soundlevel scales of consonants follows the proposed sonority hierarchy in every detail, in two cases (Quechua codasand English codas) there are no significant reversals. Overall, then, the basic hypothesis has been confirmed toa large degree, and principled explanations can be found for most of the reversals.

A useful way to summarize the results visually would be to plot the pairwise correspondences of allconsonants graphically, as shown in Figs. 4 and 5.

Fig. 4 displays the match up between obtained relative sound levels and sonority ranks for all onsetconsonants in the three languages. Fig. 5 does the same thing with coda consonants. A noteworthygeneralization is that the overall span of the sound level scale is more stretched out for onsets than for codas.Specifically, Fig. 4 goes from a low of �52.3 dB for the plain Quechua plosives /p t k q/ to a high of �5.1 dBfor Spanish /l/, a range of 47.2 dB. Codas, on the other hand, range from only �36.4 to �7.5 dB (a differenceof 28.9 dB). This is probably related to the size of the respective inventories. Across the three languages there isa mean of 10 onset natural classes but only seven for codas. Since the onset hierarchies need to distinguishbetween more segments, their total sound level spread has to be greater, all else being equal. Vowels are notdepicted in this way here since their correlation in two of the languages is not significant (Section 6.4).Furthermore, vowels involve fewer natural classes (n ¼ 3) and therefore fewer data points than consonants, sothe vowel charts would be less interesting and important.

Another way to summarize the overall correlation between sound levels and sonority, building on Figs. 4 and 5,is to compute the respective regression equations. Table 6 lists these coefficients for the six sets of consonant data.

Table 6 gives us a very good idea of the mathematical relationship which exists between sonority and soundlevels, as well as the extent to which this can vary across languages and positions (at least for consonants). Theleast squares regression lines are not displayed in Figs. 4 and 5 so as to minimize the clutter there, but theactual trend lines shown connecting the data points for each language serve as a reasonable approximation tothese. In Table 6 the highest r2 value is .95 for English codas. Given this, we can now state that the single

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sonority

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Fig. 5. Scatter plot of sonority indices and relative sound level values for coda consonant natural classes (taken from Tables 2–4).

Table 6

Regression equations for the six groups of consonant data points from Figs. 4 and 5

Group of segments Intercept Slope r2

Spanish onsets 10.6 .24 .83

Quechua onsets 12.7 .28 .80

English onsets 20.3 .80 .83

Spanish codas 14.3 .36 .82

Quechua codas 15.4 .44 .93

English codas 13.9 .48 .95


factor sonority accounts for about 95% of the systematic variability in that data subset. The correspondingregression equation, which predicts an estimated sonority index based on a hypothetical sound level score,provides a practical and intuitive method for characterizing the physical correlate of sonority in a particularprosodic position for a specific language17:

17In conjunction with Fig. 3 the possible relationship be

experiment manipulating pitch was carried out. One token

the same Spanish speaker, with the consonants occurring

protrusions of these segments was compared with a second

syllable upward by 75Hz. No other parameters were adjus

sound level scores by a mean of 0.64 dB across the 10 tokens

while pitch does have a slight tendency to interact with rel

(5) sonority ¼ 13:9þ 0:48� Lrelðin dBÞ:
[This is the sonority of English coda consonants in phrasallystressed words, where Lrel ¼ relative sound level compared toan utterance-initial low vowel.]
tween F0 and sound levels was noted. In order to test this directly, a small

each of 10 target segments were studied ([t s j n r l j i e ]]), all pronounced by

in onset position. An unmodified baseline measurement of the sound level

intensity measurement taken after shifting the F0 frequency of each target

ted. The overall result of raising F0 in this way was to increase the obtained

. This difference is not significant: t(9) ¼ 1.69, p ¼ .126. The conclusion is that

ative sound levels, its overall effect is negligible.


Compared with previously proposed correlates of sonority, the equation in (5), which is a statement of
distributions in one subhierarchy, has many advantages: (1) it is precise; (2) it is nonarbitrary; (3) it isphonetically grounded; (4) it can be empirically verified and replicated; (5) it is theory neutral; (6) it involves arelatively simple formula based on a unitary physical phenomenon driven by speakers’ production; (7) it canbe easily calculated for other subjects and languages; and (8) the underlying procedure is compatible withdifferent (competing) sonority scales. However, it must be emphasized that nothing can crucially depend onthe exact values of these regression coefficients; they are for exposition only and are tentative since they aresample-specific. Nevertheless, the obtained slope does allow us to approximate the nature of the relationshipbetween sound levels and sonority in this one hierarchy: for every decibel by which the relative sound level isincreased, the sonority rank increases by about .48 units (for the coda data in Table 4). Conversely, there is anaverage level difference of 2.1 dB between successive indices on the sonority scale (for five English speakers),where 2.1 ¼ 1C.48. Notwithstanding these findings, an important caveat is appropriate: I am not claimingthat physical measurements can replace the sonority hierarchy when actually positing formal phonologicalanalyses of specific languages, because sound levels fluctuate across utterances, speakers, and languages, attimes producing sonority mismatches. Since we all have different bodies, formal grammars as encoded in themind must be separated from their motor implementation. Rather, what we can now conclude—and this isbasically all that is being proposed here—is that the sonority scale given to us by cross-linguistic phonotacticanalyses, as posited in (4), is empirically motivated in a straightforward way since it is highly correlated withacoustic measurements of intensity or relative sound levels.
We can now make a few observations about the potentially divergent results obtained from correlatingsonority indices with sound level values for entire natural classes, as opposed to for each segment individually(foreshadowed in footnote 12). The main hypothesis pursued in this paper in fact involves the match upbetween sonority and the corresponding sound level values for whole natural classes (Section 3). Nevertheless,for the sake of comparison the mean sound level extreme values for each segment individually are also given inAppendices D–F, grouped by language, and arranged in the same general format as Tables 2–4. For example,Appendix D contains the raw Spanish data on which Table 2 is based. These individual values will not bediscussed here in detail. Suffice it to say that when the results are split up in this way (into more data points),there are more opportunities for individual reversals, whereas it is expected that natural class means will bemore stable and representative than their constituent parts. Specifically, when we compare sonority ranks withthe sound level values of individual segments, the number of data points can increase by a factor of 2–3 ormore. Consequently, there are more chances for problems. At the same time, however, some of the previousreversals (with natural classes) can be partially nullified. For example, among the Quechua onsets in Table 3,the laterals /l h/ as a class exhibit a higher sound level score than the glides /j w/ (�12.7 vs. �13.5,respectively). Nevertheless, when these four segments are tabulated individually in Appendix E, /l/ has thehighest sound level value, followed by /w/, and then /j/ and /h/ tie for third place. So in this latter table /w/correctly outranks /h/. Many other analogous situations could be pointed out, such as /j w/ vs. /N/ in Quechuacodas. Furthermore, when natural classes are split up into their constituent phonemes, these can obviouslypresent differences among themselves. For instance, /b/ might be significantly more ‘‘sonorous’’ than /d/ and /c/. Also, it is easy to demonstrate that [ph], [th], and [kh] involve different degrees of aspiration, intraoralpressure, etc., but it is still reasonable, and standard practice, to classify all of them with a commonphonological feature such as [+spread glottis].

As mentioned above, Appendices D–F list the sound level results broken down for each segment one-by-one, as well as their corresponding sonority indices. At the end of these appendices (after each language-specific table), I give the respective correlations. For example, for individual Spanish onset consonants inAppendix D, n ¼ 18, r ¼ .93, p ¼ .000. This is a more stringent test than that of the Spanish onset naturalclasses grouped together (since more values are involved), but the result is slightly higher. This control isimportant since it shows that lumping segments into the a priori manner of articulation classes from (4) doesnot obscure the inherent variation between the members of each set, as summarized in the reported groupmeans. The nine values of r listed in Appendices D–F range from .21 to .95, with an overall average of .76.While this is somewhat lower than the mean correlation of .91 for natural classes noted in Table 5, thedifference is not enough to be significant: t(8) ¼ 1.89, p ¼ .096. What this tells us is that grouping segmentsinto their respective sonority classes tends to produce correlations which are slightly more robust and stable,


but from a statistical point of view the two methods are not reliably distinct in the long run. If data from morelanguages were added to the corpus, of course, perhaps the two types of approaches would prove to beseparable. So when comparing the results of the class-based rankings in the text with the segment-basedrankings in the appendices (to evaluate which one provides a better match to the sonority scale), appropriatecaveats must be kept in mind.

Another important issue that we return to now is the fact that sound level measurements have been reportedand analyzed separately for onset consonants vs. codas, whereas the sonority hierarchy is theoretically acontext-independent scale. Up to this point I have a priori distinguished within natural classes based onprosodic position, such as treating Spanish /p t k/ in syllable onsets as a different group from /p t k/ in codas.Although it is possible to combine both sets of consonants into a single correlation, and this will in fact bedone shortly, there are several good motivations for evaluating them as separate hierarchies, at least initially.First, some classes of segments are articulated differently in the two positions (released vs. unreleased,aspirated vs. unaspirated, etc.). Second, the preference for high vs. low sonority ranks is completely reversed inthe two positions, due to the Sonority Dispersion Principle (Section 2). Third, in many languages syllable-initial phonemes have no syllable-final counterparts (and vice versa), e.g., Quechua affricates, ejectives, andaspirates. Fourth, it has been well-documented that initial consonants are pronounced with greater energythan noninitial ones (Sections 4.3.2, 4.4, and 6.1.1). For all of these reasons, the relevant segments and naturalclasses in each language have been initially analyzed separately to control for the potential effects of differentphonological environments. The same comments apply to the stressed vs. unstressed distinction betweenEnglish vowels (Sections 4.3.3, 5.3, and 6.3.3), although as we have seen, the same correlation is obtained forthis set of data regardless of this difference (Section 6.4).

Before combining consonants across the two prosodic positions, it is important to note that the previouslyobserved differences between the correlations obtained for onsets vs. codas separately is not significant overall.In Table 5 the three syllable-initial correlations have a mean value of .910, while the average of the threesyllable-final values is .917 (t(4) ¼ .15, p ¼ .890). At this point we can now ask, what happens when we pool allof the consonant data within each language? Table 7 shows the results of (re)calculating just one consonantcorrelation per language, by combining all of the onset and coda sound level values into one exhaustive set.

In Table 7 all three results are significant at the .000 level. It is interesting that the values of r increase indirect proportion to the sample size: Spanish involves a total of 15 data points and yields the lowestcorrelation (.83), while English has 19 consonant sets and the highest correlation (.95). The mean of the threevalues of r in Table 7 is .907, whereas the average of the six consonant correlations in Table 5 (onsets vs. codasseparately) is .913. This small difference is obviously not significant: t(7) ¼ .17, p ¼ .869. The implication isthat it does not matter, for the purpose of correlating relative sound level values with sonority indices, whetherwe focus on onsets alone, codas alone, or all consonants together: the outcome is equally robust in all threescenarios. This result is important since it shows that the conservative procedure adopted in this paper(splitting consonants rather than lumping them) has not affected the overall conclusions in any way. A furtherconsequence of this fact is that we can continue to assert that, despite differences within and across languagesin terms of absolute (phonetic) sound level values, the rank orders between natural classes are what reallymatter in terms of grammatical constraints rooted in sonority. In other words, although obstruents in onsetposition (Fig. 4) tend to exhibit lower intensity than their counterparts in codas (Fig. 5), phonologically theyare no less sonorous. In summary, while we have established that relative sound levels are clearly physicalcorrelates of sonority, it would be premature (too strong), based on just these data, to claim that intensity IS

Table 7

Obtained correlations (with Spearman’s r) between the sonority indices in (4) and the observed relative sound level values for consonant

natural classes (Tables 2–4), grouping onsets and codas together

Language n r p

Spanish 15 .83 .000

Quechua 17 .94 .000

English 19 .95 .000


sonority, or that the sonority scale can be directly extracted from acoustic measurements. In practice, then, thephonetic manifestation of sonority can potentially vary by language and position, and even individualspeakers. However, the raw sound level data in Tables 2–4, combined with the regression equationsencapsulated in Table 6, give us a preliminary idea of the tentative limits on the extent to which sonority mightdiffer by language and syllable structure. Analogous formulas could also be calculated for specific speakers,but it would be tedious to go into that much detail here. A broader question is, do listeners judge sonority asbeing dependent on speaker and prosodic environment? Since it would require a perceptual experiment toanswer this conclusively, it must be left for future work. Nevertheless, all of the phonotactic evidence forsonority summarized in Section 2 leads to the hope that, from a strictly phonological point of view, one singleexhaustive sonority hierarchy can still suffice for formalizing the constraints necessary to describe the soundsystems of the world’s languages.

8. Conclusion

This paper has advanced our understanding of one possible physical manifestation of sonority. We haveseen that it is feasible to express sonority as a function of relative sound levels, in rather concrete terms.Relative sonority correlates highly with relative sound level minima for consonants, and peaks for vowels, inthe three languages studied here. These results strongly indicate that phonological sonority, as derived fromcross-linguistic syllable phonotactics, does indeed have a reliable physical basis. Looked at in a different way,if sonority does not exist, how can we explain the strong and consistent match up between cross-linguisticsound level measurements and a priori sonority indices motivated primarily by syllable structure constraints?This correspondence surely points to some principled phonological mechanism that is not accidental in nature.If the notion of sonority had never been proposed until this day, it would certainly be invented soon. It mightnot necessarily be called sonority, although that label is suggestive of its acoustic basis. But after all, in the finalanalysis a name is only a name.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to John Kingston, John McCarthy, Lisa Selkirk, and Shelley Velleman for their suggestionsconcerning my dissertation, on which this paper is based. I also thank three anonymous referees, DougWhalen, Ken Olson, and especially Alice Turk for detailed comments on the preliminary manuscripts. SteveWalter and Arnie Well gave helpful advice about the statistical analysis, and Ed Quigley assisted with Praat.Two of the Spanish speakers wished to be mentioned by name: Victor Alvites and Javier Valdivieso Perry.Four of the Quechua speakers had the same request: P. Segundo Ibarra Alvarez, Juan Justiniani Quispe,Dr. Mario Mejıa Huaman, and Moises A. Rodrıguez. This material is based upon work supported by theNational Science Foundation under Grant no. 0003947. This article is dedicated to Ann Phillips, my favoritehigh school teacher, who inspired me to continue studying Spanish.

Appendix A. Complete list of Spanish words used to elicit sound level data

As discussed in Section 4.3.1, the following list displays all of the Spanish words used in obtaining phoneticdata for this study. Following each word I indicate which of its segments was actually analyzed and includedin the statistical results presented in Section 5.1.

Vowels P
honetic formT arget segmentG loss
paso [
0p]so] [ ]] ‘ pace, step (noun)’ peso [ 0peso] [ e] ‘ weight, heaviness’ pozo [ 0poso] [ o] ‘ well, pit, hole’ piso [ 0piso] [ i] ‘ floor, ground, story (of a building)’ puso [ 0puso] [ u] ‘ (he/she) put, placed, set (preterite tense)’


Onset consonants
yate [ 0j]te] [ j] ‘ yacht’ hueso [ 0weso] [ w] ‘ bone’ orate [ o0N]te] [ N] ‘ lunatic, madman; crazy, demented’ lata [ 0l]t]] [ l] ‘ tin can’ rata [ 0r]t]] [ r] ‘ rat (rodent)’ mata [ 0m]t]] [ m] ‘ (he/she) kills, murders’ nata [ 0n]t]] [ n] ‘ cream (noun)’ nata [ 0E]t]] [ E] ‘ pug-nosed (feminine singular)’ bata [ 0b]t]] [ b] ‘ dressing gown’ dato [ 0j]to] [ j] ‘ datum, fact, piece of data’ gata [ 0U]t]] [ U] ‘ female cat’ facha [ 0f]tP]] [ f] ‘ appearance, aspect, look, face’ sana [ 0s]n]] [ s] ‘ (he/she) heals, cures; sound, healthy (feminine singular)’ jata [ 0h]t]] [ h] ‘ yearling calf (female)’ chata [ 0tP]t]] [ tP] ‘ flat(-nosed) (feminine singular)’ pata [ 0p]t]] [ p] ‘ foot, leg (of animals, furniture, etc.)’ tasa [ 0t]s]] [ t] ‘ rate, price, measure, rule (noun)’ cata [ 0k]t]] [ k] ‘ (he/she) tastes, judges (wine, etc.)’
Coda consonants
harta [ 0]Nt]] [ N] ‘ satiated, full, stuffed (feminine singular)’ alta [ 0]lt]] [ l] ‘ tall, high, elevated (feminine singular)’ hampa [ 0]mp]] [ m] ‘ lifestyle of rogues, vagabonds, corrupted people’ anta [ 0]nt]] [ n] ‘ elk; decorated pillars or columns of a building’ ancha [ 0]EtP]] [ E] ‘ broad, wide, large (feminine singular)’ anca [ 0]Fk]] [ F] ‘ croup, haunch of a horse’ ovni [ 0obni] [ b] ‘ UFO’ admitir [ N]jmi0tiN] [ j] ‘ to admit, receive, give entrance, permit, concede’ agnus [ 0]Unus] [ U] ‘ a small thin wax cake with the figure of a lamb used in the
service of the mass’
afta [ 0]ft]] [ f] ‘ small white ulcers of the mouth, thrush’ asta [ 0]st]] [ s] ‘ lance, flagstaff, flagpole’ reloj [ re0loh] [ h] ‘ clock, watch’ apta [ 0]pt]] [ p] ‘ apt, fit, competent, convenient (feminine singular)’ utcus [ 0utkus] [ t] ‘ a species of plant with edible fruit that grows in Peru’ acta [ 0]kt]] [ k] ‘ act, record of proceedings, papers, files’
Appendix B. Complete list of Quechua words used to elicit sound level data (cf. Sections 4.3.2 and 5.2)

Vowels
Phoneticform
Targetsegment

Gloss

tata
[0t]t]] []] ‘father, mister’ tete [0tete] [e] ‘lead, heavy blue-gray colored metal; heavy’ toroq [0toNoq] [o] ‘species of large moraceous plant or tree with strong, resilient wood’ titi [0titi] [i] ‘fixed glance, stare’ turan [0tuN]n] [u] ‘her brother, cousin, friend, companion’
Onset consonants
yapa [0j]p]] [j] ‘increase, extra portion, bonus, appendix, thing added on, repetition, again’ wata [0w]t]] [w] ‘year, age; old’


ratay
[0N]t]j] [N] ‘to insult; to stick, adhere, unite, join’ lawa [0l]w]] [l] ‘a soup made with flour’ llapan [0h]p]n] [h] ‘all, every, everyone, altogether’ mata [0m]t]] [m] ‘ulcer, wound, or sore on the back of a beast of burden’ nanan [0n]n]n] [n] ‘painful, hurtful’ %nataq [0E]t]q] [E] ‘also, again, frequently, over and over’ sapan [0s]p]n] [s] ‘only one, unique, isolated, lone’ hatu [0h]tu] [h] ‘a decorated donkey or ass’ chatu [0tP]tu] [tP] ‘a small pitcher or jug used for holding water’ chhapa [0tPh]p]] [tPh] ‘bran, husks of ground or sifted flour’ ch’ata [0tP’]t]] [tP’] ‘union, connection between two parts of something that has broken or
split apart’
pata [0p]t]] [p] ‘chair, seat; on top, above, over, high point’ tata [0t]t]] [t] ‘father, mister’ %kata [0k]t]] [k] ‘a species of medicinal plant whose root fights fevers’ qata [0q]t]] [q] ‘cloak, overcoat, blanket’ phata [0ph]t]] [ph] ‘the action of bursting or splitting open’ thata [0th]t]] [th] ‘a violent, unexpected shaking’ khata [ kh]t]] [kh] ‘weak, lazy, feeble; plain, smooth, flat, undecorated cloth or fabric’ qhata [0qh]t]] [qh] ‘slope, dip, hill, mount’ p’ata [0p’]t]] [p’] ‘the action of biting; a congregation or group of persons observing the
same lifestyle’
t’ata [0t’]t]] [t’] ‘having six fingers or six toes on the same hand or foot’ k’ata [0k’]t]] [k’] ‘very small piece or fragment; nothing at all, not one mite’ q’ata [0q’]t]] [q’] ‘a hard portion of something which is normally soft, such as a kernel of
corn that does not pop; muddy, turbid, unclear liquid’

Coda consonants
tayta [0t]jt]] [j] ‘father, dad, pop, mister, countryman’ tawqa [0t]wq]] [w] ‘an orderly stack or pile of similar objects’ karpa [0k]Np]] [N] ‘a tent used for camping’ talta [0t]lt]] [l] ‘scaffold, platform, pedestal, abutment’ kallpa [0k]hp]] [h] ‘strength, vigor, energy, potency’ pampa [0p]mp]] [m] ‘pampa, plain, prairie; ground or floor of a house; flat, level, smooth’ tanta [0t]nt]] [n] ‘combination, collection, grouping, meeting’ kancha [0k]EtP]] [E] ‘patio, sports field, stadium, corral’ tanka [0t]Fk]] [F] ‘a forked stick used to stir up fires, poker; doorstop; midget, dwarf’ tanqa [0t]Nq]] [n] ‘the action of pushing’ astay [0]st]j] [s] ‘to haul, carry, transport; to move to another house’ ashkha [0]Pkh]] [P] ‘full, content, enough, too much, many, several’ sapsa [0s]ps]] [p] ‘rag, tatter; ragged, tattered’ watmo [0w]tmo] [t] ‘(one who acts as a) godfather or godmother’ wakta [0w]kt]] [k]�[x] ‘by accident, jokingly, in jest, unintentionally, pretending’ paqta [0p]qt]] [q]�[w] ‘with care or caution; in a threatening, angry, or vexed manner; perhaps,
maybe, by chance, just in case’

Appendix C. Complete list of English words used to elicit sound level data (cf. Sections 4.3.3 and 5.3)

Vowels
Target segment Onset consonants Target segment Coda consonants Target segment
bat
[æ] yea [j] car [a]
bot
[>] way [w] call [l]


bait
[e(j)] ray [a] cam [m]
bet
[e] lay [l] can [n]
butt
[L] may [m] gong [F]
boat
[o(w)] nay [n] have [v]
bought
[L] vane [v] lathe [j]
beet
[i(j)] then [j] jazz [z]
bit
[I] zen [z] rouge [W] boot [u(w)] genre [W] badge [dW] put [
A

]
gin [dW] nab [b]
baton
[=] bin [b] mad [d]
batches
[X] din [d] nag [c] gain [c] laugh [f]
fin
[f] math [y] thin [y] mass [s]
sin
[s] mash [P] shin [P] match [tP] hen [h] map [p]
chin
[tPh] mat [t]
pin
[ph] mack [k]
tin
[th]
kin
[kh]
Appendix D. Sound level extremes of individual Spanish segments (in dB), relative to the /a/ of PACO

Sonority index (SI)
Segment
Mean n s.d. SI Segment Mean n s.d.
9
l �5.1 25 2.1 16 o .9 25 1.6
10
N �6.3 25 2.4 17 ] .8 25 1.3
12
w �6.5 25 2.9 16 e .6 25 2.0
7
n �7.9 25 2.8 15 u �.6 25 1.9
7
E �8.2 25 3.3 15 i �2.1 25 2.0
7
m �9.0 24 3.4 Coda consonants 12
8

j

r

�9.4

�10.1

17

25

3.0

2.0
SI Segment Mean n s.d.
6
U �11.1 25 5.6 7 E �13.7 25 3.5 6 j �14.1 25 6.4 7 n �13.8 20 2.8 6 b �14.2 25 5.5 7 F �13.8 25 2.6 3 s �23.0 25 3.4 7 m �14.1 25 2.9 3 h �25.2 25 3.7 10 N �16.0 25 6.1 3 f �30.3 25 4.1 9 l �19.5 25 6.8 2 tP �33.2 25 3.1 6 j �19.9 25 8.1 1 k �44.0 25 4.4 6 U �21.2 25 9.0 1 t �44.9 24 5.7 6 b �24.3 25 11.8 1 p �47.5 25 4.0 3 h �26.9 25 7.1
3
f �29.8 25 7.3
3
s �32.5 25 3.3
1
t �35.6 24 5.2
1
k �36.1 25 6.0
1
p �37.3 25 4.2
Correlations between these sound level values and the sonority indices in (4):

For onset consonants, n ¼ 18, r ¼ .93, p ¼ .000.


For coda consonants, n ¼ 15, r ¼ .89, p ¼ .000.

For vowels, n ¼ 5, r ¼ .79, p ¼ .111.

Appendix E. Sound level extremes of individual Quechua segments (in dB), relative to the /a/ of PACON

Sonority index (SI)
Segment
9
l �11.3 25 5.4 16 o 1.3 25 2.5 12 w �13.0 25 5.2 15 u 1.0 25 3.0 12 j �14.0 25 6.3 17 ] .7 25 2.1 9 h �14.0 25 5.8 16 e .1 25 1.8 10 N �14.2 25 7.8 15 i �.7 25 3.0 7 E �14.5 25 6.5 Coda consonants
7

7

m

n

�16.9

�17.6

25

25

6.8

6.6
3
s �28.1 25 8.5 12 w �10.2 25 4.1 3 h �29.8 24 4.8 10 N �10.2 25 4.9 1 p’
h
�31.5 25 4.4 12 j �13.2 25 4.7
2
tP �32.2 23 4.3 9 h �13.3 25 3.7 2 tP’
h

�32.7
25 4.8 7 E �15.4 25 4.8 1 p
h
�32.9 19 6.4 7 F �16.5 25 4.7
1
t �34.8 20 3.7 7 n �16.7 25 4.4 1 t’
h

�35.2
24 3.9 9 l �17.8 25 4.8 1 q �37.3 23 3.6 7 N �18.5 24 4.0 1 k’
h
�37.5 24 5.3 7 m �19.3 25 4.0
v1
k �38.0 19 4.3 3 w �24.8 21 7.1 1 q’ �39.2 23 4.7 3 x �25.0 18 5.6 2 tP �41.1 25 3.0 3 P �26.5 24 5.6 v1 p �50.4 25 6.0 3 s �27.6 24 6.7 1 t �50.4 25 7.6 1 p �32.3 19 8.3 1 k �53.4 25 4.5 1 t �35.8 17 5.6 1 q �55.3 24 4.7 1 q �36.6 3 4.3
1
k �40.1 4 6.1
Correlations between these sound level values and the sonority indices in (4):For onset consonants, n ¼ 25, r ¼ .87, p ¼ .000.For coda consonants, n ¼ 18, r ¼ .95, p ¼ .000.For vowels, n ¼ 5, r ¼ .21, p ¼ .734.

Appendix F. Sound level extremes of individual English segments (in dB), relative to the / / of FATHER

Sonority index (SI)
Segment
9
l �11.8 25 2.9 17 > 1.2 25 2.0 12 w �13.3 25 3.8 16 L .7 25 1.5 11 a �13.6 25 2.9 16 L .0 25 2.0 7 n �13.6 25 1.8 16 o �.1 25 1.9 7 m �13.8 25 1.7 16 e �.4 25 2.4 6 W �13.9 26 2.4 15 I �.4 25 3.3
12
j �14.4 25 2.8 17 æA �.6 24 1.8 6 z �14.8 25 2.0 15 �.6 25 3.2


3
P �15.8 25 2.9 16 e �.7 25 2.5 3 s �16.6 25 2.5 15 u �2.5 25 3.7 3 h �19.2 25 4.1 14 = �4.6 24 2.5 6 j �19.5 24 4.2 15 i �5.7 25 2.9 5 dW �19.6 25 2.3 13 X �8.3 25 3.2 4 c �20.5 25 3.8 Coda consonants
6

4

v

b

�20.8

�21.2

25

25

3.2

4.7
2
tPh �21.4 25 2.3 11 a �7.5 25 5.0 4 d
h
�21.7 25 3.9 9 l �8.4 24 6.2
1
th
�23.4
25 2.9 7 F �14.5 25 4.6 1 k �23.6 25 2.7 7 n �14.8 25 3.0 1 ph �24.8 24 3.2 7 m �15.0 25 4.0 3 y �26.7 25 4.9 6 W �16.2 26 3.1 3 f �27.1 25 3.9 6 z �16.6 25 3.0
3
P �17.2 25 3.3 4 d �17.9 25 4.6 5 dW �19.2 25 2.6 3 s �19.8 25 2.5 4 b �20.6 25 2.7 4 c �21.0 25 2.9 6 v �21.8 25 3.4 6 j �22.0 25 3.5 2 tP �22.4 25 3.6 1 k �25.9 25 4.4 3 y �26.8 25 3.5 3 f �27.0 25 2.5 1 t �27.8 25 5.3 1 p �29.6 25 4.7
Correlations between these sound level values and the sonority indices in (4):For onset consonants, n ¼ 23, r ¼ .81, p ¼ .000.For coda consonants, n ¼ 21, r ¼ .85, p ¼ .000.For vowels (excluding [=] and [X]), n ¼ 11, r ¼ .56, p ¼ .071.

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sound level protrusions as physical correlates of sonority

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