Boundaries versus onsets in syllabic segmentation

This study investigated the explicit syllabification of CVCV words in Frenc h. In a first syllable-reversal experiment, most responses corresponded to the expected canonical CV.CV segmentation, but a small proportion includes the intervocalic consonant in both the first and second syllables, a result previously interpreted for English as indicating ambisyllabicity. Two furt her partial-repetition experiments showed that listeners systematically inc lude the consonant in the onset of the secund syllable, but also often incl ude it in the offset of the first syllable. In addition, the assignment of the intervocalic consonant to the first and second syllables was differenti ally sensitive to the sonority of the consonant and to its spelling. We arg ue that the findings are inconsistent with the traditionally held boundary conception and instead support the view that distinct processes are involve d in locating the onsets and the offsets of syllables. Onset determination is both more reliable and more dominant. Finally, we propose that syllable onsets serve as alignment points for the lexical search process in continuo us spoken word recognition. (C) 2001 Academic Press.