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The Internal Structure of the Syllable

Rebecca Treiman

Linguistic Structure in Language Processing

Studies in Theoretical PsycholinguisticsVolume 7, 1988, pp 27-52

http://link.springer.com.tiger.sempertool.dk/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-2729-2_2

Until relatively recently, phonologists tended to neglect the syllable or to leave it undefined.

Generative phonologists often claimed that the syllable played no role in phonological

organization. Recently, however, this position has changed. The syllable has begun to be

reintegrated into phonological theory. (For discussion, see Clements and Keyser, 1983.) Two

competing views of the syllable may be distinguished. In one view (e.g., Hooper, 1972), the

syllable is seen as a linear string of phonemes. The syllable itself has no internal structure.

Another position (e.g., Cairns and Feinstein, 1982; Fudge, 1969; Halle and Vergnaud, 1980;

Hockett, 1967/1973; Selkirk, 1982; Vergnaud and Halle, 1979) is that the syllable has a

hierarchical internal organization. That is, there exist units intermediate in size between the

syllable and the phoneme. Hierarchical views of the syllable typically divide the syllable into

two primary units. These are, to use the terminology of Vergnaud and Halle (1979),

the onsetand the rime.1 The onset is the initial consonant or consonant cluster of the

syllable. For example, the onset of the word strip is /str/, the onset oftrip is /tr/, and the

onset ofrip is /r/. In English, the onset is not obligatory: The syllable ip does not have an

onset. The rime of the syllable is the vowel and any consonants that come after it.

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The division between onsets and rimes in English syllables

Journal of Memory and Language

Volume 25, Issue 4, August 1986, Pages 476491

Rebecca Treiman

Wayne State University USA http://dx.doi.org.tiger.sempertool.dk/10.1016/0749-596X(86)90039-2,How to Cite

or Link Using DOI

Linguistic and psycholinguistic evidence suggests that the English syllable has two main

partsan onset(initial consonant or cluster) and a rime (vowel and any following

consonants). For example, subjects learn manipulations that respect the unity of onsets and

rimes more easily than manipulations that do not. The present results showed that these

findings held for real words as well as for nonwords and for three-consonant onsets as well

as for one- and two-consonant onsets. The strength of the onset/rime division did not vary

with the phonetic category of the prevocalic consonant. Finally, although college students

learned a word game involving the analysis of syllables more quickly than did 8-year-olds,

the two groups showed similar effects of syllable structure.

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