Boundaries versus Onsets in Syllabic Segmentation

Abstract

This study investigated the explicit syllabification of CVCV words in French. In a first syllable-reversal experiment, most responses corresponded to the expected canonical CV.CV segmentation, but a small proportion included the intervocalic consonant in both the first and second syllables, a result previously interpreted for English as indicating ambisyllabicity. Two further partial-repetition experiments showed that listeners systematically include the consonant in the onset of the second syllable, but also often include it in the offset of the first syllable. In addition, the assignment of the intervocalic consonant to the first and second syllables was differentially sensitive to the sonority of the consonant and to its spelling. We argue that the findings are inconsistent with the traditionally held boundary conception and instead support the view that distinct processes are involved in locating the onsets and the offsets of syllables. Onset determination is both more reliable and more dominant. Finally, we propose that syllable onsets serve as alignment points for the lexical search process in continuous spoken word recognition.

The Role of the Syllable in Lexical Segmentation in French: Word-Spotting Data

“…In contrast, it fits well with the hypothesis that syllables are used in speech recognition primarily as segmentation cues. Previous findings based on syllabification tasks, outlined in the introduction, already suggested a predominant role for syllable onsets (Content, Kearns, & Frauenfelder, 2001). The present study confirms and extends these findings using an online word recognition task.…”

“…Mehler et al, 1990) and with SOSH (cf. Content, Kearns, & Frauenfelder, 2001). In order to disentangle these two hypotheses, Experiment 2 was aimed at assessing the effect of misalignment between word offset and syllable offset.…”

“…Thus, potential costs of word/syllable misalignments in continuous speech processing might be strongly alleviated if the segmentation heuristic is sensitive to fine-grained phonetic details. Moreover, it should be noted that syllable-based segmentation strategies such as SOSH (Content, Kearns, & Frauenfelder, 2001) or that proposed by Cutler et al (2001) are not deterministic rules but heuristics, so that their effect could be modulated or compensated by other cues, such as lexical information. In line with this view, Fougeron, Frauenfelder, and Content (1999) compared lexical effects on phoneme monitoring and found that the decrease in the lexical effect due to the insertion of an initial epenthetic consonant (e.g., gacrobat) could be compensated when the inserted consonant had a lexical status (e.g., l'acrobat; see also Spinelli et al, 2000, for related findings).…”

“…Hence, the detection of syllable onsets would help lexical segmentation by providing the lexical search mechanisms with privileged alignment points in the signal (or its prelexical representation). We therefore proposed the Syllable Onset Segmentation Heuristic (SOSH; Content, Kearns, & Frauenfelder, 2001;; see also Content, , according to which listeners take any syllable onset to be a possible word onset and use it as an alignment point for the lexical mapping process. In this framework, the goal of segmentation is less to permit speech classification than to find likely alignments between the (presumably infrasyllabic) classification units and the lexical entries in order to recover the intended parse.…”

Performance limits for envelope based automatic syllable segmentation

“…In this interpretation, when listeners syllabify speech, locating syllable onsets and offsets constitutes two distinct operations. The onset hypothesis [5] then assumes that when there is a conflict between onset and offset preferences, the onset decision dominates. Throughout the remainder of this paper the term syllable boundary will be taken to mean a syllable onset.…”