Fig. 1.

Phonological representation of words. (A) Syllabification provides chunking to the phoneme sequence of words. While the phonological wordforms “hybrid” and “picnic” have the same sequence of consonants (C) and vowels (V), the two sequences are decomposed into syllables of different structures following syllabification rules of English. (B) Subunits and internal structure of syllables with the illustration of the word “cat” (/kæt/-/CVC/). In principle, a syllable is composed of a vowel as nucleus (i.e., /æ/) that can be preceded and followed by one or more consonants. The consonants before the vowel are referred to as onset (i.e., /k/) and those after the vowel as coda (i.e., /t/). The three components of the syllable are argued to be organized in a hierarchical structure (17), with nucleus and coda most commonly grouped into a subunit called rhyme. (C) English words (indicated as their phonemic transcription) that contrast with the word “cat” by changing a single consonant. According to a search in the English lexicon (Celex), the word “cat” forms a minimal pair with 12 other words in English by changing the consonant at syllable onset, while it forms a minimal pair with 8 other words by changing the consonant at syllable coda. This case illustrates a higher contribution of syllable onset than of coda in distinguishing minimal pairs involving the word “cat”.