Which syllable does an intervocalic stop belong to? A selective adaptation study.

Three selective adaptation experiments were conducted to investigate whether intervocalic stops are perceived as the end of the preceding syllable or as the beginning of the following one. The pattern of adaptation effects (and just as importantly, noneffects) indicated that intervocalic stop consonants are perceptually more like syllable-initial than syllable-final ones. From this it might be concluded that the perceptual system breaks down a vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) utterance into a V-CV sequence. However, the similarity of an intervocalic stop to a syllable-initial one is quite limited; the consonant in a VCV is apparently treated as essentially different from consonants in either VC or CV utterances. These results clarify, and perhaps complicate, the role of the syllable in models of the speech perception process.