HOW UNIVERSAL IS THE SONORITY HIERARCHY?: A CROSS-LINGUISTIC ACOUSTIC STUDY

This paper examines the universality of the acoustic basis for the sonority hierarchy: glides > liquids > nasals > obstruents in four genetically diverse languages: Egyptian Arabic, Hindi, Mongolian, and Malayalam. It is shown that disputed sonority contrasts, such as a) laterals vs. rhotics, b) voiceless fricatives vs. voiced stops, c) affricates vs. stops, and d) sibilants vs. other fricatives, follow language-specific patterns, while undisputed contrasts, such as sonorants > obstruents, are cross-linguistically consistent in their acoustic patterns. Differences in sonority as a result of prosodic position and interspeaker variation are not observed in the present study. 1