Lecture: How can we measure sonority?

Potential acoustic correlates of sonority

Sonority is a concept used to describe the structure of syllables and its rules. In English, for example, /bluː/ is a syllable, whereas /lbuː/ is not. This is because of the sonority (‘sound fulness’) of the phonemes: /l/ has a higher sonority than /b/ – and within a syllable’s onset, the segments’ sonority is not allowed to decrease.

However, there is still a problem about sonority: Most sonority hierarchies were established by cross-linguistic observations of syllable structure – and then, in turn, they are used to describe syllable structure. To break this circular reasoning, an independent measurement is needed. In this talk, I am focusing on possible acoustic correlates of sonority. I will present a small study where I analysed acoustic recordings for intensity and periodic energy, and compared the measurements with different sonority hierarchies. The results give a promising outlook on future research.