Vowel Aperture and Syllable Segmentation in French

The theories of Pulgram (1970) suggest that if the vowel of a French syllable is open then it will induce syllable segmentation responses that result in the syllable being closed, and vice versa. After the empirical verification that our target French-speaking population was capable of distinguishing between mid-vowel aperture, we examined the relationship between vowel and syllable aperture in two segmentation experiments. Initial findings from a metalinguistic repetition task supported the hypothesis, revealing significant segmentation differences due to vowel aperture across a range of bi-syllabic stimuli. These findings were also supported in an additional online experiment, in which a fragment detection task revealed a syllabic cross-over interaction due to vowel aperture. Evidence from these experiments suggest that multiple, independent cues are used in French syllable segmentation, including vowel aperture.