IN DEFENSE OF AN ONSET-RIME SYLLABLE STRUCTURE FOR ENGLISH

Many linguists and psycholinguists have suggested that English syllabl es have an onset-rime structure. Pierrehumbert and Nair (1995) have re cently argued against this view and in favor of the idea that syllable s have a moraic structure. We show that the results of word game exper iments reported by Pierrehumbert and Nair are consistent with the onse t-rime theory and that there are problems with their idea of output te mplates. Although people may learn about the phonological structure of a word game's output when they have a chance to do so, they tend to d ivide syllables at the boundary between the onset and the rime even wh en they do not have the opportunity to memorize a model. Moreover, the results of our recent statistical study of the distributions of phone mes in English syllables suggest that the rime is a domain for particu larly close dependencies among phonemes. We conclude that Pierrehumber t and Nair's rejection of the onset-rime model was overly hasty and wa s based on a limited set of data. When a broad range of data is consid ered, the evidence supports the idea that English syllables have an on set-rime structure.