suffix -oʼob. Consonants Some sources describe the plain consonants as aspirated, but Victoria Bricker states "[s]tops that are not glottalized are articulated with lung air without aspiration as in English spill, skill, still." Vowels In terms of vowel quality, Yucatec Maya has a straightforward five vowel system: For each of these five vowel qualities, the language contrasts four distinct vowel "shapes", i.e. combinations of vowel length, tone, and phonation. In the standard orthography first adopted in 1984, vowel length is indicated by digraphs (e.g. "aa" for IPA ). In fast-paced speech, the glottalized long vowels may be pronounced the same as the plain long high vowels, so in such contexts ka’an 'sky' sounds the same as káan 'when?'. Stress Mayan words are typically stressed on the earliest syllable with a long vowel. If there is no long vowel, then the last syllable is stressed. Borrowings from other languages such as Spanish or Nahuatl are often stressed as in the original languages. Debuccalization An important morphophonological process in Yucatec Maya is the dissimilation of identical consonants next to each other by debuccalizing to avoid geminate consonants. If a word ends in one of the glottalized plosives /pʼ tʼ kʼ ɓ/ and is followed by an identical consonant, the final consonant may dispose of its point of articulation and become the glottal stop /ʔ/. This may also happen before another plosive inside a common idiomatic phrase or compound word. Examples: ~ 'Yucatec Maya' (literally, "flat speech"), and náak’- (a prefix meaning 'nearby') + káan 'sky' gives 'palate, roof the mouth' (so literally "nearby-sky"). Meanwhile, if the final consonant is one of the other consonants, it debuccalizes to /h/: nak 'to stop sth' + -kúuns (a causative suffix) gives nahkúuns 'to support sb/sth' (cf. the homophones nah, possessed form nahil, 'house'; and nah, possessed form nah, 'obligation'), náach’ 'far' + -chah (an inchoative suffix) gives náahchah 'to become distant'. This change in the final consonant is often reflected in orthographies, so can appear as maya’ t’àan, maya t'aan, etc. Acquisition Phonology acquisition is received idiosyncratically. If a child seems to have severe difficulties with affricates and sibilants, another might have no difficulties with them while having significant problems with sensitivity to semantic content, unlike the former child. There seems to be no incremental development in phonology patterns. Monolingual children learning the language have shown acquisition of aspiration and deobstruentization but difficulty with sibilants