Sonority and Syllabicity: Acoustic Correlates of Perception

Abstract Evidence is accumulating that native speaker-hearers are not as consistent, confident, or in agreement, on counting the number of syllables in natural utterances as is commonly assumed. There are, however, instances where speaker-hearers give clear, consistent syllable counts. It is the position of this paper that the unclear cases as well as the clear cases are phonetically classifiable in terms of sonority. The experiments presented here are intended to delimit what is meant by sonority in acoustic terms.