The purpose of our study is to show that phonological knowledge is an important basis for making predictions during speech perception. Taking the phonological constraint in English that coda obstruent clusters agree in their value for voicing, we conducted two experiments using vowel–stop–fricative sequences, where the task was to identify the fricative. Stimuli included sequences that were either congruent or incongruent. Consistent with models of featural underspecification for voiceless obstruents, our results indicate that only voiced stops induced predictions for an upcoming voiced fricative, eliciting processing difficulty when such predictions were not met. In contrast, voiceless stops appear to induce no equivalent predictions. These results demonstrate the important role of abstract phonological knowledge in online processing, and the asymmetries in our findings also suggest that only specified features are the basis for generating perceptual predictions about the upcoming speech signal.

This paper provides a detailed diachronic account of the adaptation of the English posterior coronal obstruents /ʃ ʧ ʤ/ in Contemporary Korean. These consonants are variably adapted with a glide (/j/ or /w/), and the distribution of the glides is conditioned by phonetic and phonological characteristics of the English input, as well as native phonotactic restrictions. The diachronic change in the occurrence of /w/ serves as an example of a variable phonetic detail in the input that is faithfully represented in loans in earlier stages, but which is subsequently eliminated in the emerging norm. Given this data, I propose how what, on the surface, may appear to be a ‘phonological’ adaptation can arise through regularisation of what is essentially a ‘phonetic’ adaptation. This study highlights the complexity of loanword adaptation and the importance of examining all of the different factors shaping this process.

Opaque interactions have long been recognised as a challenge for Optimality Theory. We show that although there has been considerable effort to bring opacity into the scope of Optimality Theory, some types of process interactions are still problematic for the theory. Based on data from Tundra Nenets, we present and analyse a case of fed counterfeeding in which a process A feeds a process B, and B counterfeeds A. We argue that such interactions present a challenge to Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC; McCarthy 2007) since the two interactions impose contradictory ranking requirements. We propose an extension of the theory that does not abandon its main assumptions and that makes fed counterfeeding analysable in OT-CC. This extension is based on the assumption that constraints can make reference to the position specified in a previous step in the derivation.

Abstract phonological patterns and detailed phonetic patterns can combine to produce unusual acoustic results, but criteria for what aspects of a pattern are phonetic and what aspects are phonological are often disputed. Early literature on Romanian makes mention of nasal devoicing in word-final clusters (e.g. in /basm/ ‘fairy-tale’). Using acoustic, aerodynamic and ultrasound data, the current work investigates how syllable structure, prosodic boundaries, phonetic paradigm uniformity and assimilation influence Romanian nasal devoicing. It provides instrumental phonetic documentation of devoiced nasals, a phenomenon that has not been widely studied experimentally, in a phonetically underdocumented language. We argue that sound patterns should not be separated into phonetics and phonology as two distinct systems, but neither should they all be grouped together as a single, undifferentiated system. Instead, we argue for viewing the distinction between phonetics and phonology as a largely continuous multidimensional space, within which sound patterns, including Romanian nasal devoicing, fall.