Spoken word boundary detection in ambiguous resyllabification contexts in Spanish

Abstract

In Spanish, word-final consonants are resyllabified with the initial vowel of a following word, e.g. "mis amigos" (‘my friends’) is syllabified as "mi.sa.mi.gos". This study examines the role of consonant duration as a perceptual cue to identify consonants as word-final or word-initial. Twelve minimal pairs of sentences were recorded by a native speaker differing only in the lexical affiliation of the target consonant, i.e. four pairs for /s/, /n/, and /l/ respectively. Consonant duration was manipulated by computer in five incremental steps. Sixty-five native participants took part in a lexical decision experiment. Longer consonant duration was found to bias participants’ perception towards a word-initial interpretation in the case of /s/ and /n/. In contrast, longer /l/ was perceived as word-final, due to the fact that /l/ presents two tongue gestures, i.e. tip and body, which are not simultaneous in coda but sequential. Additionally, listeners were sensitive to some extra cue present in the original signal for /n/, probably due to anticipatory coarticulation. Evidence is provided for the simultaneous coda and onset status of resyllabified consonants, and accordingly they are proposed to be phonologically represented as ambisyllabic.