Evidence from previous psycholinguistic research suggests that phonological units such as phonemes have a privileged role during phonological planning in Dutch and English (aka the segment-retrieval hypothesis). However, the syllable-retrieval hypothesis previously proposed for Mandarin assumes that only the entire syllable unit (without the tone) can be prepared in advance in speech planning. ...

This paper investigates the emergence of complex syllable onsets through measurements of their duration compared to the duration of corresponding singleton syllable onsets. The results show that there is a difference in the progression in syllable onset duration that is dependent on subject age and onset structure.

This paper proposes that Northern Tepehuan is a tonal language with just one lexical tone 'low tone' and therefore privative system. L sufficient to explain the pitch contrasts in also necessary "inconsistencies" of stress assignment. Stress normally predictable from size word, syllable-weight, cued by H* intonational tone. Nonetheless, words do not obey Stress-to-Weight constraint, it could be...

In this paper, a new statistics-based pitch model for Mandarin speech is proposed. The model considers three major affecting factors on the syllable pitch contour, including lexical tone, prosodic state and inter-syllable coarticulation effect. The study emphasizes on the modeling of inter-syllable coarticulation effect. Interactive affections of neighboring tones and different inter-syllable c...

The aim of the research we h'1vecarried out is to assess the role of the syllable In the processing of speech In the very young Infant. We used three kinds of stimuli: syllabic, non-syllabic and syllabic-synthetic sequences. These were presented to infants who were less than 2 months old in an habituation-dishabituation paradigm. Results indicate that the syllable-like stimuli are discriminated...

This paper introduces a language identification approach using syllable structure information. We also review and compare other approaches. Most of these approaches use linguistic information for language identification. The information used for language identification is Malay affixation information, English vocabulary list, alphabet ngram, grapheme n-gram. The approach using syllable structur...

Taiwan Mandarin syllable contraction is a lenition process which involves the elision of the intervocalic segments and the merger of the tonal elements of two syllables. Trough depth is employed as the measure for gradience of syllable contraction in this study and the distribution of trough depth shows that syllable contraction is optional. In the perception experiment, listeners were asked to...

This paper investigates a stress phenomenon which I refer to as “contextual metrical invisibility” in several languages, the primary examples being from Mohawk and Passamaquoddy. In each of these languages, there is a class of vowels which are, in certain contexts but not in others, invisible to syllable-sensitive processes. The proposal I make is that such vowels, which I refer to as “weak vow...