Syllables are chunks in Mandarin, not in Spanish or English
Uncertainty still characterizes the role of syllables in language production within and across languages. We examined the hypotheses that syllables channel phonological encoding in European languages, perhaps more strongly in Romance than in Germanic languages, and that syllables are themselves primary encoding units in Chinese. We report parallel disyllable word-pair recitation experiments in three languages using variants of a classic design in which first syllable alignment is crossed with phonological overlap (e.g., aligned CVC: ham.let ham.per; unaligned CV ma.lice mag.net). › Continue reading