Consonant Cluster Syllabification in Preliterate Children

Authors: Caroline Floccia1, Jeremy Goslin2,3  ,Naanaa Bouketir1, Joel Bradmetz1
Authors Affiliation:
1Laboratory of Psychology, Université de Franche-Comté, France
2Laboratory of Experimental Psycholinguistics, Université de Genève, Switzerland.
3Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK.
Published:  Proceedings of Linguistic Studies Workshop, Nantes
Year of Publication:  1999

ABSTRACT
To determine the syllabification rules applied by listeners when presented with different types of intervocalic clusters, 13 4- to 5-year-old preliterate French-speaking children were tested using two tasks of disyllabic words segmentation: a repetition task of the beginning or the end of words, and a tapping task. Both tasks show comparable results. Data were compared to the segmentation solutions predicted by 5 different syllabification rules proposed by phonologists. It was shown that two of the tested algorithms fit these results. The language-specificity of children's syllabification rules is discussed.