Abstract While sonority has been studied by linguists for over a century, Parker (2008, 2011) has recently argued that the sonority hierarchy can be quantified specifically by intensity, concluding that laterals are less sonorous than flaps. In this article, we test Parker’s (2008, 2011) claim that l is less sonorous than ɾ. We find that for Bavarian German, l is better analyzed as more sonorous than ɾ since l is both more intense and longer in duration than ɾ. The aforementioned phonetic properties, as well as the phonological patterning arguments provided by Noelliste (2019), confirm that ɾ is less sonorous than l in Bavarian German dialects found in Austria. We conclude by offering our thoughts on whether the sonority hierarchy can be reduced to one specific phonetic property. We argue that, in the spirit of studies such as Price (1980), Miller (2012), phonological sonority can be deduced from a series of properties, including at least the following: intensity, duration, periodicity, presence/absence of noise, and distribution in the phonological syllable. For a great number of speech sounds, these properties will point in the same direction; the challenging cases arise when one or more of these properties contradict each other.
Bolter et al. (Mon,) studied this question.