The structure of spoken syllables: Evidence from novel word games

Several linguists and psychologists have proposed that the syllable has a hierarchical internal structure. Its primary constituents, according to the model, are the onset and the rime. The onset contains the initial consonant or consonant cluster. The rime contains the peak (vowel nucleus) and coda (final consonant or cluster). The psychological validity of this model was tested in seven experiments involving novel word games. The results provided strong support for the validity of onset and rime. Adults preferred rules that referred to these units over rules that referred to other units. Further, they learned rules that kept the onset and the rime intact more easily than rules that divided these units. The experiments did not find strong support for the notion that the rime is subdivided into peak and coda. Taken together, the results show that there is at least one level of structure intermediate between the syllable and the phoneme. Implications for several aspects of speech processing are discussed.