Jacobs, in Neurobiology of Language, 2016 18.2.3 Phonotactic Learning The question of what segment types are present in the Sonority Hierarchy is clearly related to how the term sonority is defined. It is often assumed that the Sonority Hierarchy is universal, but many researchers have proposed language-specific hierarchies. For example, it is often assumed that fricatives are more sonorous than stops, that rhotics like /r/ are more sonorous than laterals like /l/ and that high vowels are more sonorous than low vowels. A number of studies have argued that it should make finer grained distinctions as well. The Sonority Hierarchy in (5) makes reference to five categories of sounds. Thus, on this view plus stop sequences are examples of complex segments ( see Complex Segments), and therefore a word like stop would not violate the SSG. Other researchers have argued that + stop sequences in words like stop are not sequences of two separate sounds, but instead that they consist of two articulations attached to a single X slot on the skeletal tier. The literature on extraprosodicity is vast the reader is referred to Hall (2002) for discussion and for arguments against the kind of extraprosodicity described earlier. Thus, according to this view the in stop is extraprosodic, and there is no SSG violation. Extraprosodicity has also been argued to hold for English in initial position in words like stop, in which the initial cluster appears to violate the SSG. The general idea of extraprosodicity originally arose in the context of stress assignment, where it was argued that simpler rules of stress assignment could be stated if initial and/or final syllables/segments are ignored ( see Metrical Phonology and Word Stress). In terms of phonological representations, an extraprosodic segment is one that is not associated with the syllable. Some researchers have argued that the SSG holds exceptionlessly in English (and in languages like Russian and Polish) and that in words like axe the final segment is extraprosodic (or extrametrical, or extrasyllabic). Many languages allow for syllables that display even more dramatic SSG violations, e.g., Russian ‘mouth (gen.sg.)’, Polish ‘theater’. (In this example the syllable ends in a sequence of two obstruents, which are equally sonorous). One of the difficulties with the SSG is that it does not permit words like axe, because it requires that there should be a descending sonority slope in the coda.
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