Lexeme and speech syllables in English and Hindi. A case for syllable structure

Syllables are universal structures in articulation, but current speech production models disagree on whether syllables play a role only during the organization of phonemes during production or whether they play a more central role. Arguments against having syllables structure within the mental lexicon are resyllabification (phonemes moving from their lexical syllabic position to another syllable during connected speech, and the storage costs of having such information in the lexicon. This study used speech corpus analysis to quantify the resyllabification rates of English and Hindi as well as the storage costs of 3 prominent speech production models. The results show that English has a higher resyllabification rate than Italian or Hindi and that models that only use post-lexical syllabification actually have larger storage costs compared to models that store syllabic information. This indicates that having syllable structures within the mental lexicon might be a plausible scenario.