Judgments of the number of syllables in a given word are usually consistent, but there is a class of English words with liquid codas and tense vowel/diphthong nuclei for which speakers have variable syllable count intuitions (e.g. fire, feel). This variation has previously been hypothesized to be associated with differences in subsyllabic structural organization, which predicts that speaker jud...

We investigated the variation of /l/ in a large speech corpus through forced alignment. The results demonstrated that there is a categorical distinction between dark and light /l/ in American English. /l/ in syllable onset is light, and /l/ in syllable coda is dark. Intervocalic /l/ can be either light or dark, depending on the stress of the vowels. There is a correlation between duration (the ...

This paper applies Chinese subword representations, namely character and syllable n-grams, into the TextTiling-based automatic story segmentation of Chinese broadcast news. We show the robustness of Chinese subwords against speech recognition errors, out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words and versatility in word segmentation in lexical matching on errorful Chinese speech recognition transcripts. We prop...

Most of the world’s languages use both segment and lexical tone to distinguish word meanings. However, few studies on spoken recognition in show conflicting results concerning relative contribution (sub-)syllabic constituents, time course how segmental tonal information is utilised. In Experiments 1 & 2, participants listened monosyllabic Mandarin words with presence a phonological competitor, ...

Several empirical lines of investigation support the idea that syllable-sized units may be involved in visual word recognition processes. In this perspective, the present study aimed at investigating further the nature of the process that causes syllabic effects in reading. To do so, the syllable frequency effect was investigated in French using event related potentials while participants perfo...

We investigated the role of syllables during speech planning in English by measuring syllable-frequency effects. So far, syllable-frequency effects in English have not been reported. English has poorly defined syllable boundaries, and thus the syllable might not function as a prominent unit in English speech production. Speakers produced either monosyllabic (Experiment 1) or disyllabic (Experim...

In this study, the relation between the timing of a rising or falling pitch movement and the syllable it accentuates is investigated. The five-syllable utterance /mamamamama/ was provided with a relatively fast rising or falling pitch movement. The timing of the movement was systematically varied and Dutch subjects were asked to indicate which syllable they perceived as accented. In order to fi...

This paper aims to investigate whether--and how--consonant sonority (obstruent vs. sonorant) and status (coda vs. onset) within syllable boundaries modulate the syllable-based segmentation strategies. Here, it is questioned whether French dyslexic children, who experience acoustic-phonetic (i.e., voicing) and phonological impairments, are sensitive to an optimal 'sonorant coda-obstruent onset' ...

Three categorization experiments investigated whether the speaking rate of a preceding sentence influences durational cues to the perception of suprasegmental lexical-stress patterns. Dutch two-syllable word fragments had to be judged as coming from one of two longer words that matched the fragment segmentally but differed in lexical stress placement. Word pairs contrasted primary stress on eit...