Syllabification of bisyllabic nonwords: evidence from short-term memory errors

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Phonology

Background:

• Investigates the nature of errors in short-term memory for spoken stimuli.
• Explores whether these errors involve recombination of syllables from different items.
• Examines the potential of such errors to illuminate the process of syllabification.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine if short-term memory errors combine syllables from distinct to-be-remembered items.
• To analyze how these recombination errors reflect underlying syllabification processes.
• To connect findings to linguistic theories of syllabification and prior metalinguistic research.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments involving college students recalling lists of stimuli.
• Stimuli included two CVCVC (consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant) nonwords and three filler digits.
• Analysis of error patterns, specifically syllable recombination, under varying stress conditions and consonant types.

Main Results:

• When the second vowel was stressed, errors often blended the initial CV of one nonword with the final CVC of another, particularly with obstruent middle consonants.
• Stress on the first vowel led to error patterns dependent on vowel type (tense vs. lax).
• CV/CVC recombinations were more frequent than CVC/VC recombinations when the middle consonant was an obstruent compared to a sonorant.

Conclusions:

• Short-term memory errors provide evidence for syllable structure in spoken word processing.
• The observed recombination patterns support specific linguistic theories of syllabification.
• Findings contribute to understanding the interaction between memory, speech perception, and phonological structure.