摘要：The concept of sonority — that sounds can be placed along a universal sonority scale — has been used to explain avariety of linguistic phenomena related to syllable structure both within and across languages. The linguistic workdescribing these patterns has inspired a number of experimental investigations suggesting that sonority is a criticalfeature for understanding speech processing in normal and impaired individuals, and language acquisition. Despitethese findings, there are two distinct views regarding the nature of sonority: phonological accounts that viewsonority as an organizational feature of phonological representations, and phonetic accounts that presupposephonetic correlates of sonority which are responsible for the distributional patterns (Clements, 2009). The presentstudy aims to contribute to the debate on the nature of sonority by elucidating its locus in the spoken productionsystem by comparing the performance of impaired individuals on production tasks involving stimuli that differalong dimensions defined by sonority.
