The Elusive / Illusive Syllable

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
A common phonological reduction in casual speech is vowel loss in unstressed syllables as in s ‘pose. How the phonetic detail of this reduction is implemented in production and how it is perceived is the focus of the study. Three types of test words were selected for investigation, initial /sp/ and /sk/ clusters, two- and three-syllable words beginning with an unstressed /s/ plus vowel followed by /p/ or /k/ in the stressed syllable, and words with a cluster created by the loss of the vowel. A representative triad is sport, support, and s ‘port. Some speakers differentiated between real clusters and created clusters while others did not. The relationships between production characteristics and word identification were complex in that there were no invariant acoustic cues determining syllabicity.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: