Segmental duration as a cue to syllable boundaries in Czech

The aim of the study is to establish whether the acoustic signal contains cues to the syllabification of words that are perceptually relevant, as suggested by previous research. Syllabification preferences of 27 speakers of Czech were examined in a behavioural experiment using disyllabic nonsense words with 10 CC clusters as stimuli. The C1/C2 duration ratio of the intervocalic cluster was manipulated by shortening and lengthening of both consonants. Participants repeated auditorily presented stimuli by syllables, with clear pauses between them (a pause-insertion task). Logistic regression analyses revealed significant effects of sonority type of the cluster, word-edge phonotactics and syllabification strategy reported by the participants in a post-test interview (only half of the participants reported not to have followed any strategy). However, the manipulation condition did not turn out to be a significant predictor, although the C1/C2 ratio correlated negatively with the rate of cluster division. The correlation was in compliance with the hypothesis stating that when C1 is longer than C2, the cluster has a higher probability of being maintained as the onset of the following syllable.

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