Consonant Clusters and Structural Complexity

✍ Scribed by Philip Hoole (editor); Lasse Bombien (editor); Marianne Pouplier (editor); Christine Mooshammer (editor); Barbara Kühnert (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 416
• Series: Interface Explorations [IE]; 26
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

There is currently a wealth of activity involving the analysis of complex segmental sequences from phonetic, phonological and psycholinguistic perspectives. This volume draws from selected contributions to the conference Consonant Clusters and Structural Complexity held in Munich in August 2008. Consonant sequences, whether occurring within individual lexical items or emerging in running speech at word boundaries, give particularly striking evidence for the temporal complexity of human speech. But contributions also consider the integration of  tonal and vocalic elements into syllable structure. The main aim of the volume is to do justice to this complexity by bringing together researchers from a wide range of backgrounds.

The book is organized into four main sections entitled ‘Phonology and Typology’, ‘Production: Analysis and Models’, ‘Acquisition’, and ‘Assimilation and reduction in connected speech’.

✦ Table of Contents

Introduction
Part I. Phonology and Typology
Structural complexity of consonant clusters: A phonologist’s view
On the relations between [sonorant] and [voice]
Limited consonant clusters in OV languages
Manner, place and voice interactions in Greek cluster phonotactics
Consonant clusters in four Samoyedic languages
Part II. Production: analysis and models
Articulatory coordination and the syllabification of word initial consonant clusters in Italian
A gestural model of the temporal organization of vowel clusters in Romanian
Coupling of tone and constriction gestures in pitch accents
Tonogenesis in Lhasa Tibetan – Towards a gestural account
Part III. Acquisition
Probabilistic phonotactics in lexical acquisition: The role of syllable complexity
Acquiring and avoiding phonological complexity in SLI vs. typical development of French: The case of consonant clusters
Part IV. Assimilation and reduction in connected speech
Articulatory reduction and assimilation in n#g sequences in complex words in German
Overlap-Driven Consequences of Nasal Place Assimilation
The acoustics of high-vowel loss in Northern Greek dialects and typological implications
List of contributors
Subject index
Language index