Aspects of the Syntax of Behavior: Syllable Structure and Speech Rate

This paper shows that maximal rate of speech varies as a function of syllable struc­ ture. For example, eev syllables such as [sku] and eve syllables such as [kus] are produced faster than vee syllables such as [usk] when subjects repeat these syllables as fast as possible. Spectrographic analyses indicated that this difference in syllable duration was not confined to anyone portion of the syllables: the vowel, the consonants and even the interval between syllable repetitions was longer for vee syllables than for eve and eev syllables. These and other findings could not be explained in terms of word frequency, transition frequency of adjacent phonemes, or coarticulation between segments. Moreover, number of phonemes was a poor predictor of maximal rate for a wide variety of syllable strucrures, since vee strucrures such as [uIk] were produced slower than phonemically longer eeev structures such as [sklu], and V structures such as [a] were pr~duced no faster than phonemically longer ev structures such 11S ega]. These findings could not be explained by traditional models of speech production or articulatory difficulty but supported a complexity metric derived from a recently proposed theory of the serial production of syllables. This theory was also shown to be consistent with the special status of ev syllables suggested by Jakobson as well as certain aspects of speech errors, tongue-twisters and word games such as Doub.le Dutch.