Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

word-final syllables. Still, the preferential retention of final syllables in children’s
truncations does suggest the possibility that the privileged psycholinguistic status of these
syllables could lead to analogous phonological effects in adult grammars.
3.2. Phonological strength effects in final position
The foregoing makes the prediction that phonological strength effects should be
attested in final position, and this is indeed the case. The following sections provide an
account of those effects. I begin with a brief discussion of previous work on tone in final
position. I then move on to segmental licensing asymmetries, beginning with two case
studies illustrating the complexity of the issue from the standpoint of the relative roles of
phonetics and phonology in determining the shape of PN patterns. I then present a
catalogue of attested final strength patterns, from which I extract a typological
generalization concerning the role of syllable structure in determining the distribution of
final strength effects. This generalization allows us to clearly disambiguate the relative
roles of phonetic and psycholinguistic prominence in producing final-position PN
patterns.
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