ABSTRACT
This chapter explores an account of the patterns, an approach that has often been applied in recent years to explain some of the patterns we find in disordered speech. Phoneticians have long been able to measure the acoustic and aerodynamic characteristics of individual speech sounds. The chapter derives a measure called sonority, which might be thought of as the amount of sound let out during the production of a segment. Sonority patterns are now in plateau rather than a rise or fall, but that only requires the sonority sequencing principle (SSP) to be modified to admit both level and sloping sonority profiles. The chapter explores how the syllable can be characterized as having a hierarchical structure of onset and rime, with the rime further divided into nucleus and coda. It also explains how the onset, nucleus, and coda units can be simple or complex.
