An Experimental Study of Syllabification in Icelandic

Abstract

In many languages the syllabification of intervocalic consonants has been shown to be influenced by the principle of onset maximization, whereby as many segments are assigned to the subsequent syllable as are phonotactically legal. Icelandic, however, has been repeatedly argued to follow a coda maximization strategy even though opinion has remained divided on this. This paper is an attempt to address this issue from the psycholinguistic perspective. The results of two experiments leave little doubt that the proper syllabification in Icelandic is onset maximization rather than coda maximization, thereby aligning Icelandic with many other languages and providing further support for the onset maximization principle. A number of other aspects were investigated, including the special status of certain two-consonant clusters, preaspiration and gemination. Clusters with a maximum sonority difference between their constituents were found to tend towards tautosyllabicity, whereas those with a smaller sonority difference gravitate towards heterosyllabicity. Furthermore, there is at least some evidence for the claim that both preaspiration and gemination lend themselves to an analysis in terms of a sequence of two identical consonants at the underlying level.