Phonotactic generalisations can be computed at different levels of granularity, from a coarse-grained legal/illegal dichotomy (blick, dwick ≻ *bnick, *lbick) to a fine-grained gradient of acceptability (blick ≻ dwick ≻ bnick ≻ lbick). This article investigates the sensitivity of the English metrical parse to the granularity of medial onset phonotactics. We present two experiments that feature pseudo-words with medial consonants and CC clusters varying in word-edge frequency and sonority (e.g. vatablick, vatadwick, vatabnick, vatalbick). The metrical parse is inferred from a hyphenation experiment and an online stress-assignment experiment. The results of both studies indicate that the parse is stochastic, and guided by relatively fine-grained phonotactic dependencies. Vocabulary simulations suggest that this level of granularity may arise because the gradient parser consistently outperforms the coarse-grained alternative across the developing lexicon.

This paper contributes to the typology of laryngeal harmony by analysing an unusual case of long-distance laryngeal co-occurrence restrictions and alternations in Lezgian. This pattern, previously unmentioned in the phonological literature, is the first known case of alternations involving ejective harmony. In Lezgian, local processes mask the interaction of ejectives and plain voiceless stops. This is robustly supported by our dictionary analysis, which reveals a ban on the co-occurrence of ejectives and plain voiceless stops within the foot. Both harmony alternations and static co-occurrence restrictions are sensitive to foot structure, unlike previous cases of consonant harmony. Harmony also interacts opaquely with vowel syncope, and certain co-occurrences of plain and ejective stops are resolved with dissimilation rather than harmony, showing a conspiracy to avoid co-occurrences. We demonstrate an account within the Agreement by Correspondence framework and discuss implications for the typology and analysis of consonant harmony.

This article introduces basic principles of a generative theory of phonology that unifies aspects of parallel constraint-based theories and serial rule-based theories. In the core of the grammar are phonological processes that consist of a markedness constraint and a repair. Processes are universal, but every language activates a different set, and applies them in different orders. Phonological processes may be in bleeding or feeding relations. These two basic relations are sufficient to define more complicated interactions, such as blocking, derived and non-derived environment effects, chain shifts and allophony.

Many previous studies have argued that phonology may leave some phonetic dimensions unspecified in surface representations. We introduce computational tools for assessing this possibility though simulation and classification of phonetic trajectories. The empirical material used to demonstrate the approach comes from electromagnetic articulography recordings of high-vowel devoicing in Japanese. Using Discrete Cosine Transform, tongue-dorsum movement trajectories are decomposed into a small number of frequency components (cosines differing in frequency and amplitude) that correspond to linguistically meaningful signal modulations, i.e. articulatory gestures. Stochastic generators of competing phonological hypotheses operate in this frequency space. Distributions over frequency components are used to simulate (i) the vowel-present trajectories and (ii) the vowel-absent trajectories. A Bayesian classifier trained on simulations assigns posterior probabilities to unseen data. Results indicate that /u/ is optionally produced without a vowel-height specification in Tokyo Japanese and that the frequency of such targetlessness varies systematically across phonological environments.