<OT> New Posting: ROA-829

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 829-0506

Syllabification, sonority, and perception:  new evidence from a language game

Elliott Moreton <moreton at unc.edu>
Gary Feng <garyfeng (AT) duke.edu>
Jennifer L. Smith <jlsmith AT email DOT unc DOT edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=829


Abstract:
What determines syllabification -- sonority (Zec 1988) or
perceptibility (Steriade 1997)?  We elicited syllables from
16 English speakers via the 'sounding-out' language game
(used to teach reading), and tried to predict the odds that
an original coda consonant would be followed, rather than
preceded, by a vowel in game outputs (e.g., [d] in 'seed'
-> [s@ + i + d@] vs. [s@ + id]).  For each consonant, sonority
was estimated following Parker (2002), and the perceptual
advantage of CV over VC was estimated from confusion matrices
(Cutler et al. 2004).  Results from 16 speakers show that
the odds of a CV vs. VC output are closely related to sonority,
but unrelated to CV-VC perceptual advantage.

Comments: 
Keywords: sonority, perceptibility, reading, language game
Areas: Phonology,Phonetics,Psycholinguistics
Type: Conference Proceedings Chapter

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=829