Some cues for syllable juncture perception in English

Most previous acoustic research on syllable juncture phenomena has used as stimuli recordings of natural speech. From this research it has been possible to suggest that certain differences observed in spectrograms of the recordings might cue the differences in the perceived location of the syllable boundary, but confirmatory tests with synthetic stimuli have been lacking. This experiment uses synthetic stimuli to examine intervocalic /st/ clusters to determine the effects of formant transitions onto the /s/, silence between the end of the /s/ noise and the /t/ burst, and aspiration on the /t/ in determining the location of syllable boundaries in English. Formant transitions appear to have little or no effect on the boundary, but silence and aspiration both affect perception of the boundary location. The fact is noted that the aspiration on the /t/ is a feature of allophonic alternation in English. A proposal made earlier by Lehiste that allophonic alternations can carry structural information is thus confirmed by this experiment. Some suggestions for further research are appended.