This work discusses the syllable structure of Al-Ahsa dialect of Arabic. Al-Ahsa dialect is a variation of Arabic spoken in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. An OT (Prince and Smolensky 1993, 2004) framework is adopted and provides a complete analysis of the syllable structure found in the dialect under discussion. It is concluded that Al-Ahsa dialect prohibits initial consonant clusters bu...

Our paper investigates the phonetic correlates of syllable structure focusing on syllabic consonants. Cross-linguistically, syllables containing consonantal nuclei are often subject to a number of restrictions compared to their vocalic counterparts. However, some languages, like Slovak, allow relatively freely distributed syllabic liquids. Phonetic studies of syllable structure have shown that ...

The structural elements of the prosodic hierarchy and the ways in which phonological generalisations make reference to them are investigated. Assuming, as argued, that these elements constitute a universal set of primitives, the different types (categories) of such elements, especially the syllable, are examined more closely. Specifically, the traditional weight dichotomy of ‘heavy’ vs. ‘light’...

We asked whether invariant phonetic indices for syllable structure can be identified in a language where word-initial consonant clusters, regardless of their sonority profile, are claimed to be parsed heterosyllabically. Four speakers of Moroccan Arabic were recorded, using Electromagnetic Articulography. Pursuing previous work, we employed temporal diagnostics for syllable structure, consistin...

This paper presents a study of Sinhala syllable structure and an algorithm for identifying syllables in Sinhala words. After a thorough study of the Syllable structure and linguistic rules for syllabification of Sinhala words and a survey of the relevant literature, a set of rules was identified and implemented as a simple, easy-to-implement algorithm. The algorithm was tested using 30,000 dist...

Adult zebra finch songs consist of stereotyped sequences of syllables. Although some behavioral and physiological data suggest that songs are structured hierarchically, there is also evidence that they are driven by nonhierarchical, clock-like bursting in the premotor nucleus HVC (used as a proper name). In this study, we developed a semiautomated template-matching algorithm to identify repeate...

Articulatory duration of vowels is often measured as the duration from jaw closure maximum to jaw closure maximum, flanking the production of the syllable nucleus. However, this method may not necessarily represent articulatory syllable duration, since the actual onset/offset of the syllable depends on the specific articulator (lip, tongue) that implements the articulation of the syllable onset...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether Spanish children that are learning to read use the syllable unit in word reading. We used a visual version of the syllable monitoring technique (Mehler, Dommerges, Freavenfelder & Seguí, 1981). For Experiment I, we selected first grade readers at the end of the first year of reading instruction. In the Experiment II we selected second grade r...

In this paper, we present a new syllabification algorithm for Malay language. Syllabification is the process to extract or divide syllable from words. Syllabification process is language dependent where each language can have its own set of syllable structure. Syllabication is an important component in speech synthesizer, speech recognition and transliteration system. Syllabification algorithms...

In current theories of word reading the structure and operations of the phonological buffer are quite underspecified. We investigated this issue by running a reading aloud experiment in Italian. We adopted a priming paradigm, with three-syllabic words as primes and targets and we jointly manipulated two effects ascribed to the stage of phonological and phonetic encoding, that is stress priming ...