The role of syllables in speech processing: infant and adult data

Abstract

An empirical account is offered of some of the constants that infants and adults appear to use in processing speech-like stimuli. From investigations carried out in recent years, it seems that syllable-like sequences act as minimal accessing devices in speech processing. Ss are aware in real time of syllabic structure in words and respond differently to words with the same initial three phonemes if the segmental one is CV /... and the other CVC /---- Likewise, infants seem to be aware that a ‘good’ syllable must have at least one alternation if it is composed of more than one phoneme. When the segment is only one phoneme long, its status is necessarily somewhere between that of the phoneme and the syllable. An important problem that arises with the syllable is that it is an unlikely device for speech acquisition. Indeed, there are a few thousand syllables and the attribution of a given token to a type is far from obvious. Even if physical invariants for syllables in contexts were to be found, the task facing the child still remains one of sorting thousands of types from many more tokens. Issues concerning acquisition versus stable performance will be addressed to further constrain possible models. In addition, I try to show that even though information processing models are useful tools for describing synchronic sections of organisms, the elements that can account for development will have to be uncovered in neighbouring branches.