In many of the world's languages, segments which appear in perceptually of psycholinguistically prominent positions such as initial syllables, stressed syllables, and syllable onsets exhibit privileged phonological behavior. This privileged behavior is manifested three ways: triggering of phological processes, blocking of phonological processes, and licensing of phonological contrasts not found in other positions. This book examines these diverse segmental asymmetries, using Optimality Theory, a constraint-based approach to generative grammar, as an analytic tool. The central claim of the study is that the phonological asymmetries associated with prominence derive from high-ranking