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Abstract Guébie is an Eastern Kru language spoken by about 7000 people in the Gagnoa prefecture of Côte d’Ivoire. This paper provides an overview of the phonology of Guébie, including the complex tone system with four contrastive pitch heights, multiple types of vowel harmony, reduplication in multiple morphosyntactic contexts, CVCV/CCV alternations, and the phonotactic behaviour of implosives as sonorant‐like rather than obstruent‐like. Comparisons with other Kru and West African languages are made along the way. 

This study uses non-native perception data to examine the relationship between perceived phonetic similarity of segments and their phonological patterning. Segments that are phonetically similar to one another are anticipated to pattern together phonologically, and segments that share articulatory or acoustic properties are also expected to be perceived as similar. What is not yet clear is whether segments that pattern together phonologically are perceived as similar. This study addresses this question by examining how L1 English listeners and L1 Guébie listeners perceive non-native implosive consonants compared with plosives and sonorants. English does not have contrastive implosives, whereas Guébie has a bilabial implosive. The bilabial implosive phonologically patterns with sonorants in Guébie, to the exclusion of obstruents. Two perception experiments show English listeners make more perceptual categorization errors between implosives and voiced plosives than Guébie listeners do, but both listener groups are more likely to classify implosives as similar to voiced plosives than sonorants. The results also show that Guébie listeners are better at categorizing non-native implosive consonants (i.e., alveolar implosives) than English listeners, showing that listeners are able to extend features or gestures from their L1 to non-native implosive consonants. The results of these experiments suggest a cross-linguistic perceptual similarity hierarchy of implosives compared with other segments that are not affected by L1 phonological patterning. 

Abstract Phonological alternations are often specific to morphosyntactic context. For example, stress shift in English occurs in the presence of some suffixes, -al , but not others, -ing : "Equation missing" , "Equation missing" , "Equation missing" . In some cases a phonological process applies only in words of certain lexical categories. Previous theories have stipulated that such morphosyntactically conditioned phonology is word-bounded. In this paper we present a number of long-distance morphologically conditioned phonological effects, cases where phonological processes within one word are conditioned by another word or the presence of a morpheme in another word. We provide a model, Cophonologies by Phase, which extends Cophonology Theory, intended to capture word-internal and lexically specified phonological alternations, to cyclically generated syntactic constituents. We show that Cophonologies by Phase makes better predictions about the long-distance morphologically conditioned phonological effects we find across languages than previous frameworks. Furthermore, Cophonologies by Phase derives such effects without requiring the phonological component to directly reference syntactic features or structure. 

Guébie (also known as Gaɓogbo) is a Kru language spoken by about 7,000 people in the Gagnoa prefecture in southwest Côte d’Ivoire. Guébie people are primarily subsistence farmers, growing cassava, rice, corn, and plantains. Many also grow cocoa and rubber for profit. In the past 20 years there has been an influx of outsiders settling in Guébie villages, new roads have been developed which lead to easier access to nearby cities, and new schools have been built where French is taught and use of Guébie is not allowed. For these reasons, among others, French and Bété, the local language of wider communication, are replacing Guébie in many domains of daily use, and Guébie is not always spoken in the home and passed on to children.