摘要：Sonority is a characteristic of speech sounds which, acoustically, refers to their loudness orsaliency and, articulatorily, to the openness of the vocal tract. Sounds which are low in sonority arebest at the margin of the syllable since they provide the largest contrast with the syllable peak.Instead, sounds high in sonority should be best in coda to provide maximum contrast with thefollowing syllable (e.g., Clements, 1990). There is evidence that aphasic patient simplify thesyllable sonority contour (Beland et al., 1990; Den Ouden & Bastiaanse, 1998; Romani & Calabrese,1998; Romani et al., 2011). However, phoneme sonority, frequency and markedness are largelyoverlapping variables, so that it unclear which one is really responsible for the error patters. Weconsidered the relative contribution of these variables in two groups of Italian aphasic labeled as‘apraxic’ (N=ll ) and ‘phonological’ on the basis of rates of phoneme errors (e.g., Romani et al.,2011).
