Syllabification of spoken words has been largely used to define syllabic properties of written words, such as the number of syllables or syllabic boundaries. By contrast, some authors proposed that the functional structure of written words stems from visuo-orthographic features rather than from the transposition of phonological structure into the written modality. Thus, the first aim of the stu...

This paper develops computational tools for evaluating competing syllabic parses of a phonological string on the basis of temporal patterns in speech production data. This is done by constructing models linking syllable parses to patterns of coordination between articulatory events. Data simulated from different syllabic parses are evaluated against experimental data from American English and M...

Although in some languages there are phonological distinctions between syllabic and nonsyllabic segments, and between accented and unaccented segments. There is reason to believe that neither syllables nor accent-groups (measures) are present in the phonological representations of words in permanent memory. Syllables and other prosodic structures are characteristically predictable from segmenta...

We carried out a simultaneous fMRI-EEG experiment based on discriminating syllabic minimal pairs involving three phonological contrasts characterized by different degrees of visual distinctiveness (vocalic labialization, consonantal place of articulation or voicing). Audiovisual CV syllable pairs were presented either with a static facial configuration or with a dynamic display of articulatory ...

Tagalog adjectives and nouns variably occur in two word orders, separated by an intermediary linker: adjective-linker-noun versus noun-linker-adjective. The linker has two phonologicallyconditioned surface forms (–ng and na). This paper presents a large-scale, web-based corpus study of adjective/noun order variation in Tagalog, focusing in particular on phonological conditions. Results show tha...

Tashlhiyt Berber has entered the phonological folklore as an unusual language in which any consonant can be syllabic, many words consisting entirely of consonants. I shall argue for an alternative analysis, according to which the epenthetic vowels which frequently accompany syllabic consonants are the phonetic realizations of syllable nuclei. Where no epenthetic vowel is evident, it can be rega...

The speech signal conveys information on different time scales from short (20–40 ms) time scale or segmental, associated to phonological and phonetic information to long (150–250 ms) time scale or supra segmental, associated to syllabic and prosodic information. Linguistic and neurocognitive studies recognize the phonological classes at segmental level as the essential and invariant representat...

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...