Table 2 Spearman’s rank-order correlation coefficients between the sonority/aperture proposed in the linguistics literature1,7,14,15 and the factor scores obtained in the present analysis, averaged over the same phonemes.

From: English phonology and an acoustic language universal

Sonority/aperture scale

Factors

Low & mid-high

Mid-low

High

de Saussure (1916/1959)14

0.3415

0.8251*

−0.3597*

Selkirk (1984)15

0.3025

0.8708*

−0.2840

Harris (1994)7

0.3691*

0.8218*

−0.3863*

Spencer (1996)1

0.5380*

0.8347*

−0.4549*

  1. Asterisks represent statistically significant correlation (p < 0.05).
Back to article page