An Experimental Investigation of Syllabification

The coordination of the rapid movements of the tongue, lips and other moveable parts when we speak depends critically on how speech sounds are organized into syllables. This organization also plays a crucial role in the distribution of sound categories in the utterance, such as the location of stress and pitch movements, but speakers generally lack conscious access to this organization. The structure of syllables differs from language to language, and is one of the key ways in which languages differ from each other in speech sound patterns. Descriptions of pronunciation in the language of interest in this study have not agreed on how sounds are organized into syllables. Clarifying this matter via experimental methods provides insight into the sound patterns of this language, and how syllables vary across languages. The work also contributes to the development of educational resources in the language and to research capacity in higher education institutions in the region. The study includes a series of five experiments with native speakers. In the first four experiments, the timing of speech production movements are tracked through acoustic and airflow measurements. Movements for sounds belonging to the same syllable are more tightly coordinated with each other than sounds belonging to different syllables. This variation in the temporal interdependence of sound events is used to determine which sounds belong to the same syllable. In the fifth experiment, speakers will produce tongue twisters under time pressure. Speakers under these conditions are expected to make many slips of the tongue, in particular errors in the location of consonants. It is known that consonants misplaced by mistake tend strongly to get misplaced to a comparable position in another syllable. The pattern of consonant ordering errors therefore provides evidence as to which consonants belong to the same syllable position. These studies provide the first objective, quantitative evidence bearing on these issues in this or any related language. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.