Toward an understanding of English syllabification

Using written and oral syllabification tasks and analyses of spelling errors, we studied how college students syllabify words with medial consonant clusters. Several principles of syllabification were evident. People almost always separated the phonemes of a cluster like /tl/, which is illegal at the beginnings and ends of words. A “short” vowel tended to attract consonants to its syllable, as did a stressed vowel. Finally, different syllabifications were produced for clusters like /dr/, which show the typical rise in sonority from the first consonant to the second, and /st/ clusters, which do not. Implications of the results for linguistic theories of syllabification and for studies of the syllable's role in speech perception and reading are discussed.