Segmental processes

Recurrent patterns are also found in rules themselves. We begin our typological survey of processes with segmental processes and proceed to prosodic ones. Put roughly, segmental phonology deals with how the features of one segment affect the features of another segment, and prosodic processes are those that pertain to the structure of syllables, stress, and the rhythmic structure of words, and phenomena which relate to the position of segments in a phonological string. This division of processes is at this point strictly heuristic, but research has shown that there are important representational differences between segmental, i.e. featural, representations and syllabic or rhythmic representations.