Phonological and Morphological Influences in the Syllabification of Spoken Words

Abstract

Words appear to be stored in memory in syllabic units that adhere to the phonology and morphology of the language (e.g., Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994; Treiman & Danis, 1988a). Three experiments investigated the formation of the syllabic representation of words using the structural induction phoneme monitoring paradigm in which stimulus lists are disproportionately weighted with words of one syllabic structure. In Experiment 1, two phonological principles of syllabification were compared to determine if one (maximum onset principle) might take precedence over the other (phonotactic illegality) during the formation of the initial structural representation of a word. Results suggest that phonotactic legality overrides the maximum onset principle. In Experiments 2 and 3, phonological and morphological parsings were pitted against each other to determine whether morphological influences in syllabification could be found as early as phonological influences. Results demonstrated that phonology, not morphology, guided syllabification. Experiment 4 demonstrated that the null effects of morphology were likely due to the stage of processing being tapped by the induction paradigm. Findings suggest that the formation of syllabic structure is guided by phonology prior to morphology.