An Experimental Approach to Ambisyllabicity in English 1

The factors that influence native English speakers to make a consonant ambisyllabic is explored in 627 bisyllabic words. The /b/ in habit, for example, was considered ambisyllabic when a participant chose hab as the first part of the word, and later in the experiment, bit as the second. About 20% of the responses were ambisyllabic. For words such as rabbit with a single intervocalic consonant, a strong effect of geminate spelling was found to interact with social variables such that older participants, and those with a college degree made the consonant ambisyllabic more often than younger ones and those without a college degree. The idea that a stressed lax vowel in the first syllable conditions both the ambisyllabicity of the consonant and its geminate spelling is not supported since the two only coincide in 75% of the cases. Ambisyllabicity also occurred more often when the vowel preceding the single medial-consonant was lax, or stressed, or when the medial-consonant was a sonorant rather than an obstruent. The influence of word-level phonotactics on syllabification was clearly evident in responses to words with two medial-consonants. A consonant such as the medial /d/ in standard is attested as the second consonant in the coda of many English words (e.g. lard), as well as in the single-consonant onset of many others; for this reason it is a prime candidate for ambisyllabicity. This contrasts with the /n/ in standard, which is never the first consonant in word-initial cluster (e.g. *ndorf) and therefore, not made ambisyllabic by the participants.