This study presents a micro-typological description of German dialects, focusing on the structure of 13,492 tokens of monosyllables, across 182 locations within Germany. Based on data from the Phonetischer Atlas der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, systematic geographical differences in both the segmental and prosodic organization of syllables are explored. The analysis reveals a North–South contrast in the organization of syllable structure. While the North tends toward more simple CVC syllables, the South tends toward the clustering of obstruents. An analysis of sonority dispersion reveals that in southern German, final demisyllables tend to follow more closely the sonority scale. Based on Markov chain models, the study reveals geographical differences in transition probabilities between the segments within monosyllables in German dialects.*

I investigate the acquisition of affrication in Québec French (QF), where affricates are in complementary distribution with coronal stops, being realized before high front vowels and glides. Previous research on other languages shows that affricates are acquired before branching onsets, which supports the idea that complexity at the level of the segment is acquired before complexity at the level of the syllable (Lleó & Prinz, 1997). In contrast, I hypothesize that affricates are acquired after branching onsets in QF, as learners are required to understand the constraints on their distribution. I examine longitudinal data from two QF-speaking children for whom the acquisition of branching onsets has been previously analyzed (Rose, 2000). Results show that affricates are indeed acquired after branching onsets, consistent with the hypothesis. Overapplication errors indicate that children make generalizations about the phonological constraints on affrication from an early age, which is expected for the acquisition of rules.

This study examines the production of consonant clusters in simultaneous Polish–English bilingual children and in language-matched English monolinguals (aged 7;01–8;11). Selection of the language pair was based on the fact that Polish allows a greater range of consonant clusters than English. A nonword repetition task was devised in order to examine clusters of different types (obstruent-liquid vs. s + obstruent) and in different word positions (initial vs. medial), two factors that play a significant role in repetition accuracy in monolingual acquisition (e.g., Kirk & Demuth, 2005). Our findings show that bilingual children outperformed monolingual controls in the word initial s + obstruent condition. These results indicate that exposure to complex word initial clusters (in Polish) can accelerate the development of less phonologically complex clusters (in English). This constitutes significant new evidence that the facilitatory effects of bilingual acquisition extend to structural phonological domains. The implications that these results have on competing views of phonological organisation and phonological complexity are also discussed.

The languages of the Northwest Saamic group evince a pattern of syllabification that maximises the complexity of the coda in a bimoraic stressed syllable (cf. Kiparsky 2004 on Fenno-Swedish). The coda maximisation requirement interacts with four other syllabic well-formedness constraints in a fixed ranking that regulates the sonority profile, quantity and structural complexity of the rhyme. Varying the point at which the coda maximisation requirement interleaves with the constraints in this fixed ranking generates a restrictive microtypology of coda maximisation in Northwest Saamic. The last part of the paper proposes to eliminate the stipulative fixed ordering by ranking the four syllabic well-formedness constraints in a proper inclusion (stringency) hierarchy (de Lacy 2004). It is argued that syllable rhymes may be characterised as falling on a scale of degree of perceptual integrity (dpi) and that complex codas are more dispreferred when the syllable has low dpi.