This study examined event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with differences in the frequency of the initial syllable of target words whose syllabic structure provided either a match or mismatch with the /CV/ and /CVC/ syllables under analysis. Results showed ERP effects that were consistent with syllabic activation between 300 and 600 ms, with high frequency syllables producing more positiv...

This paper describes the processing of 2465 sentences (or utterences) which are collected by phonetical rules from a big corpus--recent years' newspaper, "People's Daily" and etc., as materials of speech recognition and speech synthesis database. In these sentences, both phonetic phenomena and sentence patterns are included. We first consider the phonetic distribution among syllables: inter-syl...

We report a series of experiments that demonstrate an effect of syllabic position on reaction time during phoneme monitoring in English. In our stimuli, the third phoneme of each word was the target phoneme, and it belonged either to the coda of the first syllable (coda-type target) or to the onset of the second syllable (onset-type target). By manipulating the proportions of the target types, ...

This paper reports an experiment designed to investigate whether post-focus tonal realization is constrained by prosodic structure in Shanghai Chinese (SH). Previous studies have shown that in SH, focus expanded the f0 range of bi-syllabic tone sandhi words while pitch register lowering, instead of pitch range compression, was consistently found on post-focus bi-syllabic tone sandhi words. The ...

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 ...

In this paper, we investigate syllabic structure and its variation in a corpus of French radio interview speech. The aim of this study is to relate sequential pronunciation variants, i.e. variants with different numbers of phonemes to syllabic restructuring. In French schwa and liaison are two well-known phenomena which allow for a variable number of phonemes. We first aim to quantify syllabic ...

Between phonological forms and their orthographic representations a close connection can be established. Previous psycholinguistic research has amply illustrated that word recognition can be influenced by orthography (Perre & Ziegler, 2008; Taft, 2001) and that orthography plays a role in phonemic awareness (Cheung, Chen, Lai, Wong, & Hills, 2001; Tyler & Burnham, 2006). However, despite the lo...