A comparison of theoretical and human syllabification

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Phonology
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Phonological syllabification theory presents numerous conflicting models.
• Understanding syllable structure is crucial for linguistic analysis and natural language processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the performance of five French syllabification procedures.
• To evaluate these procedures against human syllable boundary placement.
• To identify which syllabification principles best reflect human perception.

Main Methods:

• Lexical analysis of French words to assess procedural differences.
• Metalinguistic syllable repetition task with human participants.
• Comparison of computational predictions with human segmentation data.

Main Results:

• Significant practical differences were found between syllabification procedures, especially with complex consonant clusters.
• Human syllabification consistency varied based on experimental conditions and consonant clusters.
• Procedures based on phonotactic regularities showed higher agreement with human segmentation than sonority-based ones.
• Human participants favored single consonant onsets, contrary to the maximal onset principle.

Conclusions:

• Phonotactic regularities are more predictive of human syllabification than sonority.
• The maximal onset principle is not consistently reflected in human syllable segmentation.
• Obstruent-liquid clusters are perceived as indivisible units in French syllabification.