This paper examines the timing of the L and H tonal targets that constitute the phrase-initial pitch rise in the Seoul Korean LHLH intonation pattern. Two hypotheses, the segmental anchoring hypothesis and the constant duration hypothesis, are examined, by varying speech rate. The segmental anchoring hypothesis states that the beginning and the end of a pitch rise are independently aligned with respect to segments. The alternative hypothesis holds that the interval between the L and H tones should remain stable. It was found that segmental alignment and duration targets simultaneously affect the timing of L and H tonal targets. The model proposed here, the ‘Alignment-Duration’ model, takes these two factors as weighted constraints, which require alignment and duration targets to be realised. The actual timing of the F0 events is determined as the values that minimise the summed cost of violations of these constraints, yielding a compromise between their demands.

Certain optional phonological processes may apply to any number of the potential targets in a form, yielding outputs in which the process applies to a proper subset of the available loci. Such patterns are incompatible with OT-based frameworks that produce variation by providing multiple constraint rankings. While one ranking may favour exhaustive application and another no application, no ranking favours application at just some loci. The framework presented here, Markedness Suppression, solves this problem: eval may ignore any violation mark assigned by designated markedness constraints, creating variation by manipulating candidates' violation profiles. By ignoring different violation marks on different evaluations, the full range of attested forms is produced, including ones with intermediate levels of process application. Markedness Suppression achieves better empirical coverage than competing frameworks, in terms of both producing the correct range of variants and modelling their output frequencies.

The child-specific phenomenon of preferential neutralisation in initial position, which reverses a positional bias attested across adult grammars, represents a long-standing problem for formal models of developmental phonology. In a phonetically based model of phonology, child-specific phonological patterns may emerge as the consequence of physical differences between child and adult speech. This paper presents new case-study data suggesting that a child-specific pattern of fricative neutralisation in initial position has its roots in children's articulatory limitations. Coarticulated fricative and vowel gestures are shown to require independent control of the tongue and jaw, known to be problematic for developing speakers. Substitution errors affecting fricatives are analysed as a phonologised reflex of this phonetic pressure to avoid overlapping vowel and fricative gestures. The positional asymmetry emerges as the consequence of the differing degrees of gestural overlap permitted in syllable-initial vs. syllable-final position, as encoded in the framework of Articulatory Phonology (Browman & Goldstein 1986).

Homeric Greek, Kalevala Finnish, Old Norse and Middle Tamil are all languages in which weight is claimed to be exclusively binary in the poetic metrics. As I demonstrate through corpus studies of these traditions, the poets were sensitive to additional grades of weight, such that finely articulated continua of syllable weight can be inferred from distributional asymmetries in the metres. Across all four languages, the scales are strongly correlated (for example, in each, C0V<C0VC<C0VV<C0VVC). These language-internal scales reflect the cross-linguistic typology of categorical weight criteria, providing new evidence for weight universals. A metrical grammar is proposed in a maximum entropy constraint framework in which categorical and scalar/gradient constraints interact to generate the weight-mapping typology.

We asked whether invariant phonetic indices for syllable structure can be identified in a language where word-initial consonant clusters, regardless of their sonority profile, are claimed to be parsed heterosyllabically. Four speakers of Moroccan Arabic were recorded, using Electromagnetic Articulography. Pursuing previous work, we employed temporal diagnostics for syllable structure, consisting of static correspondences between any given phonological organisation and its presumed phonetic indices. We show that such correspondences offer only a partial understanding of the relation between syllabic organisation and continuous indices of that organisation. We analyse the failure of the diagnostics and put forth a new approach in which different phonological organisations prescribe different ways in which phonetic indices change as phonetic parameters are scaled. The main finding is that invariance is found in these patterns of change, rather than in static correspondences between phonological constructs and fixed values for their phonetic indices.

Much debate in recent years has focused on the relative contribution of analytic and channel biases in shaping the typology of sound. Moreton (2008) argues forcefully for the strength of analytic bias, such as Universal Grammar and other non-modality-specific cognitive biases that facilitate the learning of some phonological patterns and inhibit that of others, in creating typological asymmetries on its own, unassisted by the robustness of phonetic precursors. This article focuses on the assessment of phonetic precursor robustness. The main goal of this article is two-fold: (i) to establish the inadequacy of Moreton's method of evaluating relative phonetic precursor robustness and to offer an alternative to his approach; (ii) to report the results of a cross-linguistic study comparing the nature of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation and the interaction between obstruent voicing and vowel height with the same languages – no previous studies have directly compared these two phonetic precursors.