HOW UNIVERSAL IS THE SONORITY HIERARCHY?: A CROSS-LINGUISTIC ACOUSTIC STUDY

Carmen Jany, Matthew Gordon, Carlos M Nash & Nobutaka Takara
University of California, Santa Barbara

ID 1096
[full paper]

Parker (2002) explores the hypothesis that segmental sonority in the phonological sense has concrete measurable physical correlates. In a study of English and Spanish, Parker concludes that intensity is the most reliable correlate of sonority. This paper extends Parker’s study to four more genetically diverse languages: Egyptian Arabic, Hindi, Mongolian, and Malayalam, thereby examining the universality of the acoustic basis for the sonority hierarchy: glides > liquids > nasals > obstruents. It is shown that disputed sonority contrasts, such as a) laterals vs. rhotics, b) voiceless fricatives vs. voiced stops, c) affricates vs. stops, and d) sibilants vs. other fricatives, follow language-specific patterns, while undisputed contrasts, such as sonorants > obstruents, are cross-linguistically consistent in their acoustic patterns. Differences in sonority as a result of prosodic position and interspeaker variation are not observed in the present study.