• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.101-110
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• 2018

This study aimed to show that Selkirk's concept of resyllabification offers a better analysis than Kahn's ambisyllabification to account for phonetic resyllabification. We conducted two production experiments to investigate the acoustic characteristics of the English /s/ in real words and nonce words. Ten English native speakers and six English native speakers participated in experiment 1 and experiment 2, respectively. Three acoustic cues - frication duration, center of gravity and aspiration duration of word-medial /s/ - were measured. We found that these three cues of the word-medial /s/ were realized significantly differently depending on the stresshood and openness of the preceding syllable. We preferred Selkirk's resyllabification to Kahn's ambisyllabification to explain this result because the word-medial and intervocalic /s/ behaved as the coda (as opposed to the onset) when the preceding syllable was stressed and open. The result thus suggested that two conditions must be met for the resyllabification rule to apply in English: a word-medial consonant is resyllabified only when its preceding syllable is stressed and open.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.19-38
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• 2001

The question of how / ... VCV .../ sequences should be syllabified is a much discussed, yet unresolved, issue in English phonology. While most researchers recognize an over-all universal tendency towards open syllables, there seem to be at least two different views as regards the analysis of / ... VCV .../ when the second vowel is unstressed: ambisyllabicity (e.g., Kahn 1976) and resyllabification (e.g., Borowsky 1986). Basically, we adopt the latter view and will present further evidence in its favor. This does not exclude low-level “phonetic” ambisyllabification, however. Following Nespor and Vogel (1986), we also assume that the domain of syllabification or resyllabification is the phonological word. With the new conception of the syllable structure of English, we attempt a reanalysis of Aitkin's Law as well as fe-tensing in New York City and Philadelphia.