Four experiments investigated the role of the syllable in Chinese spoken word production. Chen, Chen and Ferrand (2003) reported a syllable priming effect when primes and targets shared the first syllable using a masked priming paradigm in Chinese. Our Experiment 1 was a direct replication of Chen et al.'s (2003) Experiment 3 employing CV (e.g., ,/ba2.ying2/, strike camp) and CVG (e.g., ,/bai2....

Songs of songbird species such as Bengalese finch consist of sequences of syllables. While syllables are temporally stereotypical, syllable sequences can vary and follow complex, probabilistic transition rules. Recent experiments and computational models suggest that a syllable is encoded in a chain network of projection neurons in premotor nucleus HVC (proper name). Precisely timed spikes prop...

In 1968, Ernst Pulgram began his classic monograph on the syllable with the wise words, “conscience, courtesy, and caution require that anyone wishing to concern himself with the syllable read all, or at least most, of the enormous literature on it.” The years since his study have only magnified the challenge of this suggestion. Yet life is short, and space shorter still, and so in these few pa...

Do Cantonese listeners really use phonotactics information in the segmentation process of Cantonese continuous speech? Because some phoneme transitions across Cantonese syllables occur much more often than the others, the transitional probability may cue the locations of possible syllable boundaries in Cantonese speech. Two syllable-spotting experiments were conducted. Results clearly indicated...

This paper proposes a model of differential tonal perception in which perception of tonal movement in spoken language i s influenced by syllable structure. In the proposed model, tonal movement at syllable onset is perceptually coded differently from movement in the syllable nucleus or in the coda. An F0 contour through the syllable onset or at the beginning of the nucleus is coded as a level t...

The word length effect is one of the cornerstones of trace decay plus rehearsal models (TDR) of memory. Words of long spoken duration take longer to rehearse than words of short spoken duration and as such suffer more decay and are thus less well recalled. The current experiment manipulates both syllable length and spoken duration within words of fixed syllable length in an aim to test the assu...

This paper presents our investigations on the syllable-related processing during human perception of Mandarin spoken sentences. Two behavioral perception experiments were conducted employing a signal synthesis method in a previous study [1]. We found (1) a clear relationship between speech intelligibility and syllabic rates of spoken sentences and (2) significantly higher speech intelligibility...