Jason Shaw

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The temporal organization of syllabic structure

Jason Shaw
NYU

ABSTRACT

In this talk I present a rigorous methodology for evaluating syllabic structure on the basis of experimental phonetic data. As a test case, I present articulatory data on Moroccan Arabic and English, two languages claimed to parse similar strings into different syllable structures, e.g. [f.lan] vs. [flan] for Moroccan Arabic and English, respectively. Syllable parses are distinguished in the data through analysis of patterns of stability between articulatory events in structurally relevant intervals. These stability patterns are then evaluated against the output of a computational model. The model takes a syllable structure as input and generates temporal actuations of that structure under different noise conditions. This allows quantitative evaluation of specific theoretical hypotheses with respect to continuous data. Results implicate a tautosyllabic parse of initial clusters in English and a heterosyllabic parse of initial clusters in Arabic. Beyond the results for these specific languages, the model reveals the range of validity of certain stability-based indexes of syllable structure and generates predictions that allow evaluation of a syllabic parse even when stability-based heuristics break down. Overall, the proposed methodology seeks to establish a principled link between the mental organization of discrete linguistic primitives and patterns in continuous data by integrating a third component—a mathematical and computational basis for the discreteness/continuity relation.