Sonority in Modern Hebrew
Aviad Albert
(reviewers: Daniel Asherov, Matthew Gordon)
Abstract:
This paper investigates the phonotactics of Modern Hebrew as a means to demonstrate a novel approach to the notion of sonority in phonological theory, whereby sonority is understood to be a measure of pitch intelligibility, correlating with periodic energy in the acoustic signal, and with a coarse universal sonority hierarchy of discrete phonological units. I compare a novel model—the Nucleus Attraction Principle—against three different models based on the established Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), analyzing a corpus of prototypical pronunciations of a large set of Modern Hebrew Segholate nouns. The success of the novel proposal is discussed in the context of the current
symbol-based analysis and in the context of related works that incorporate continuity in phonological models of speech perception (Albert & Nicenboim 2022), calling for a paradigm shift in the theory.
Albert, Aviad. 2022. “Sonority in Modern Hebrew”. Radical: A Journal of Phonology, 4, 531-594.